The Handsomest Young Man in England by Michael Hastings

I bought this illustrated biography of Rupert Brooke in 1970 and am still enjoying leafing through it many years later. A hundred years on from the outbreak of the Great War the reproduced sepia photographs of Rupert Brooke and his friends tell of a lost world, another age. One of my favourite photographs is of Brooke reading to Frances Cornford on a Norfolk beach on August 2nd 1914. Days later he was in training for the Royal Naval Division.
Frances Cornford wrote of 'the young, Apollo, golden haired' 'magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life'. Like so many of that generation, Brooke lost his life less than a year later. It was W. B. Yeats who described him as 'the handsomest young man in England'.
My mother had a hardback copy of Brooke's poems that I read to her while she lay dying in hospital from septicaemia: ironically, the same illness that took Brooke's life.
We often visit Grantchester, take tea in the Orchard and walk by the river, hearing 'the breeze sobbing in the little trees'. Nothing has changed; time stands still as it did then, over a hundred years ago.
Stands the church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?