To watch the day breaking from purple to dazzling gold while we trotted up a deep-rutted lane; to inhale the early freshness when we were on the sheep-cropped uplands; to stare back at the low country with its cock-crowing farms and mist-coiled waterways; thus to be riding out with a sense of spacious discovery – was it not something stolen from the lie-a-bed world and the luckless city workers – even though it ended in nothing more than the killing of a leash of fox-cubs? One of the most obvious symptoms of this ambivalence about the new world is Sassoon's dislike of modernism in literature.

So, we are immersed in rural Kent, with servants and horses and steam trains and a bucolic life of gentle pursuits. How about this for an English country morning: “The air was Elysian with early summer and the shadows of steep white clouds were chasing over the orchards and meadows; sunlight sparkled on green hedgerows that had been drenched by early morning showers.Absent was his famous turnaround and stance against WWI, but perhaps that comes in the next instalment given this is the first in a trilogy. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.

It's not until Dixon arranges for young George to have a pony of his own that Sherston finds the great love of his life - horses. Homosexuality also gets a look in: three male friendships feature prominently in the book and can either be treated as bromances or as veiled homosexual encounters - both are satisfactory for the reader. All through the book it's also possible to see criticisms of the system that led to war – and the people who did so little to stop it, and were so blissfully unaware that it could happen. It's a picture of the Edwardian world caught in aspic just before it fades - the troubles of the young George Sherston, standing in for Sassoon, are no more dire than finding good horseflesh, a well-made pair of riding boots, and enough money to hunt each season - something he can only manage by going into debt when he moves to a more toffy part of the country with his local Master of Hunt as a kind of assistant, and must hide the fact that although well educated, his yearly income is smaller than your average well-bred chappie. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Sassoon/Sherston is just beginning to get a glimmering of what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian 'However inhumane its purpose it was a kindly country scene' … A fox-hunt in West Sussex.

When I was at high school in the 1970s his anti-war poems, and those of Wilfred Owen, featured prominently in our English lessons, a fashion that seems to have passed. This is an interesting novel, not the simple evocation of a lost past that I was expecting; there is much more nuance and Sassoon was clearly expressing a good deal of ambivalence (sitting on the fence if I am being cynical).This novel is a fictionalised account of Sassoon's experiences during and immediately following the First World War; it was an instant success, eclipsing his earlier work, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and remains a literary classic of the period. It has been a couple of years since I read this book but it left a deep impression and I commend it to everyone.

A fictionalised autobiography of Siegfried Sassoon, who depicts his life through the upper-middle class George Sherston as he grows up and loses his innocence in the First World War. Other key memoirs about WW I are Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger (5 stars) , Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden (4 stars) (also a friend of Sassoon), Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, badly translated but worth it--in French the title is simply Feu, and it's better to read it in French until a better translation comes along.He also quite deliberately includes outside opinion on the hunters – like the clergyman who shouts that they are "brutes". Signed on the limitation page by Sassoon and Nicholson and numbered 152 out of only 300 copies issued. There are some colourfully drawn comic creations and Sassoon also includes those who expressed contrary opinions; clergy and farmers who were critical of hunting. For the first days of the Somme, he was in reserve opposite Fricourt, watching the slaughter from a ridge. Ultimately everything leads to the final two sections and his enlistment in the army as WWI looms unexpectedly from out of the quiet pastoral background in which he has been snuggly swaddled up to this point.