When Heroes' Twilight was originally published in 1965, it offered radical perspectives on the poetry, fiction and autobiographical writing of the First World War, mapping an area of literature which remains raw and challenging. Anthony Powell in the Telegraph described this as 'the best available all-round account of the first-war writers'; Neil Acherson in the New York Review of Books called it 'the broadest and most interesting study of British "Great War" writing which has been published'.

This revised and enlarged edition restores the book as an irreplaceable study of the work of those who fought: victims, like the poets Charles Sorley, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg; and survivors, who returned to their experiences in prose works long after it had ended, like Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. An account of responses to the war by civilian writers, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and D. H. Lawrence among them, is included, and a final chapter discusses poems and novels about the war by writers born long after it was over.