Anyone growing up in England, at least anyone from my own generation, knows something of the poets of the First World War. Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen all featured in the curriculum when I was a schoolboy. I don’t remember if Ivor Gurney’s work was covered, but I certainly became aware of his poems in my university days and, much later, his music.

Much of Gurney’s life was blighted by mental illness. He first suffered a nervous breakdown while a student at the Royal College of Music, but his condition was much exacerbated by his exposure to the horrors of trench warfare in 1916 and 1917. He fought at Ypres and at the Battle of the Somme, and was shot and gassed. Returning home from the front, he got some support from friends and patrons, but his condition was sufficiently serious for him to seek what proved to be fairly rudimentary treatment in a series of asylums. He died in 1937 in a public asylum in Dartford.

Gurney got some recognition in his lifetime for his poems and songs and was admired by many of his more celebrated peers like Vaughan Williams. Nevertheless, it was only after his death that his work started to be appreciated properly. With Dweller in Shadows, Kate Kennedy might enhance his reputation even further. She has written a compassionate, insightful, and thoughtful account of the life and work of a brilliant and troubled man. My hope is that her biography brings a wider audience to the poetry and music of someone who was at least the equal of his much more famous contemporaries.

The first volume of Channon’s diaries, which I read earlier this year, weighed in at a massive 1,000 pages and covered twenty years. He clearly got more loquacious in his middle years because the second volume is even longer and covers only six years. He can perhaps be forgiven because those were momentous times for England, Europe, and the world, and Channon had a ring-side seat.

On the evidence of these diaries, Channon in middle age was much the same as he was in his younger years: a snob, a social climber, a casual anti-Semite, and a very poor judge of people and situations. But something in the background in the early diaries comes to the fore in these middle years – a certain bitterness and melancholy. Expressions of joy and delight are much fewer. Was it the crisis in his marriage, his failure to achieve high office, separation from his beloved son, or the depressive effect of the war years? Some mixture of all of these things is the most likely explanation, but Channon here looks more lonely, more bitter, and more isolated than ever. His growing sexual feelings for other men, especially for Peter Coats, offer little comfort.

The diaries covering 1938 to 1943 are engrossing but somewhat frustrating. Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler and his last years in office are described brilliantly. Channon, pro-appeasement, pro-Chamberlain, pro-German, and pro-Franco is, as usual, wrong about almost everything, and his antipathy to Churchill and Halifax is enough to ensure he’s banished to the political sidelines when he longed for the powerful role he thought he deserved. Momentous events like the evacuation of Dunkirk are dismissed in a single line while routine and often dull politicking gets excessive attention. He’s further from the center of royal and political intrigue than he was a few years earlier, a consequence, I suspect, of his growing unpopularity and declining influence. As the war progresses, we find Channon with fewer political allies and disconnected from the fashionable society that had dominated his life in the happier times of the 1920s and 1930s. Middle-age has arrived and with it a more nuanced appreciation of life’s gifts and disappointments, all recorded with Channon’s customary honesty.