Forever England explores Rupert Brooke’s life from schooldays to the Great War and in so doing builds a remarkable picture of a long-lost England and a generation’s descent into war. Brooke’s poems emerge dramatically from a tangled web of love friendship mental illness and politics. He reveals also the existence of a previously unrecorded love child from a South Seas romance.<br />The WW1 legend was largely brought about by the words of one of his sonnets: ‘If I should die think only this of me/That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.’ The poem and all that it represented became the focal point of a nation’s grief for its lost youth.<br />Asked why Brooke was special his Commander-in-Chief answered 'Is it because he was a hero? There were thousands? Is it because he looked a hero? There were a few. Is it because he had genius? There were others. But Rupert Brooke held all these three gifts of the gods in his hands.<br />Forever England is written and narrated by Mike Read.