Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, A Biography 1918-1967 by Jean Moorcroft Wilson. Duckworth £30

THIS is the second and concluding volume of Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s biography of Sassoon. He was a World War I hero, who was decorated with the Military Cross for, as he said, “chasing 80 Germans out of a trench”. Thereafter the man they called ‘Mad Jack’ publicly dropped his MC into the River Mersey, despite the army trying to say he was having a minor nervous breakdown.

He was a fine war poet, perhaps not as good as Wilfred Owen who was killed in the last days of the war. Sassoon was 32 when the war ended in 1918 and by 1919 he remarked that “most people think I’m dead”. Ruggedly handsome, he was pursued and lionised – the war had produced an uncharacteristic rebel.

Hampstead Labour Party vainly coaxed him but he did not respond, to be their candidate in the 1918 General Election. The post-war world of London’s society produced the Bright Young Things, and an upper class bemoaning the loss of the ‘flower of a generation’. It seems to have evaded them that the working class lost the best part of 600,000 people.

Sassoon got a job on the Labour newspaper the Daily Herald, which is now The Sun, as its literary editor. This was still the time of “the love that dare not speak its name”. Undaunted he embarked vigorously on a series of homosexual love affairs. There was Gabriel Atkin, who was addicted to dope – fashionable drugs at the time were morphia and opium – and his sexual journeys also brought couplings with Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Philip of Hesse, the musical comedy star Ivor Novello (the Lloyd Webber of his day) and, painfully, Stephen Tennant, a rouged, perfumed, bejewelled extravagant queen who survived in rural Wiltshire until the end of the century.

With all of this, he won the respect of the literary and musical establishment, Thomas Hardy, William Walton, Edward Elgar, Walter de la Mare, the bizarre Sitwell Trio and ‘Laurence of Arabia’ T E Lawrence, Robbie Ross (Oscar Wilde’s great friend) – even Winston Churchill, who tried to rescue him from pacifism.

This is the book’s strength – these glimpses of movers and shakers. The author, Moorcroft Wilson, teaches English at Birkbeck College, lives in Camden, and is a zealous one for detail.

Sassoon continued to flirt with the Left – he supported the miners, and the General Strike, prison visiting and the 1930s anti-war movement. After a handsome legacy he bought a fine house with 220 acres in Wiltshire where he remained until his death in 1967. He struggled along with seven indoor staff, eight outdoor, a groom, a chauffeur and a stable-boy.

For a decade, from 1928, he wrote his barely disguised biography, Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston’s Progress. Against the odds he married Hestor Gatty in 1933 who gave them a son, George, in the autumn of 1936. It was a turbulent and tormented relationship – he expelled her from the house. On the surface he appeared a rural saint, but egotism and vanity were deep in his soul.

In 1957, he became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church. His progress from gallant officer, horse-riding fox-hunter and cricket fanatic to the heavenly pilgrim, ended in Heytsbury House, “certain of eternal life”, with the trees he planted sighing, the birds singing and perhaps the foxes slyly smiling.