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Hello, in 1916, the military cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welsh fuseliers for conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches.

The citation noted that he had braved rifle and bomb fire and that, owing to his courage and determination, all the killed and wounded were brought in.

The hero in question was the poet Siegfried Sassoon.

And a year later, and at great personal risk, Sassoon publicly denounced the conduct of the war in which it fought so well.

Sassoon had a long and eventful life after surviving the trenches. It included a string of homosexual affairs, a failed marriage, a religious conversion, and several tumultuous arguments with literary friends.

He continued to write poetry until his death from cancer in 1967.

But how significant a poet is Siegfried Sassoon? What version of Englishness did this half-Jewish, fox-hunting, homosexual, cricket lover invent for himself?

And how do you explain the mind of a man who bitterly opposed the First World War, yet fought in it with an almost insane courage?

We'll meet to discuss Siegfried Sassoon, a Jean-Marcrop Wilson, lecture in English with Birkbeck College, University of London, and a biographer of Sassoon.

Fran Brierton, reader in English, an assistant director of the Sheamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at the University of Belfast, and Matt Egremont also, a biographer of Siegfried Sassoon.

Jean-Marcrop Wilson, can you give us a sense of Sassoon's family background and what sort of upbringing he had?

Well, it's an unusually interesting background, because not only were both families very distinguished, but they were also very different, and I think this contributes massively to how contradictory Sassoon's own nature was.

The Sassoon's were, they were merchant princes, they went back to the courts of the Persian courts, one of his ancestors. His great-great-grandfather was a prince of the captivity, and his great-grandfather, the one he was most conscious of later on, was David Sassoon, the great patriarch whom he admired enormously.

His own grandfather was the first of David's first sons to come to England, and David's grandson was Sassoon's father, and that was Alfred Alfred.

So they started in Baghdad, they'd been pushed out as it were to Bombay, where they did great action, including many philanthropic actions, then one of them came to England.

Absolutely, and well, all of them came to England subsequently, but Sassoon's grandfather, who was called Sassoon, David Sassoon, just to confuse us, was actually in the first two arrived.

What about his mother's side?

His mother's side were thornycrofts and engineers and sculptors, sculptors to start off with, farmers originally, farmers from Cheshire, farmers from Norfolk, the mother, who was his grandmother, was a thornycroft, and she was the daughter of another well-known Victorian sculptor called Francis.

Thomas Thornycroft is the man whom we know as the sculptor of the Statue of Burgessia on the Westminster Bridge just outside the houses of Parliament.

Siegfried's uncle, Hamo, who stood in a relation really as father to him, because his own Sassoon father had left home just before he was five, run off with his mother's best friend, apparently, very sad story, and affected Sassoon deeply.

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