“... Office’s Information and Research Department. Kingsley Martin: Decayed liberal. Very dishonest; Stephen Spender: Sentimental Sympathiser and very unreliable; Ian Mikardo: I don’t know much about him, but have sometimes wondered; Richard Crossman: ??Political climber. Zionist (appears sincere about this). Too dishonest to be outright FT. Nearly all ...”

“... a prurient interest in Jeffrey Archer’s spotty back and T.S. Eliot’s rupture truss (to which Stephen Spender enigmatically refers) mingles with a pious desire to be as well-informed as possible. On the whole, I’m not entirely sorry to be led from temptation by Jones’s obedient vandalism or Valerie Eliot’s stonewall around her husband’s ...”

“... and may explain her occasional soapiness when she should be abrasive, towards weak poets such as Stephen Spender, or towards some of Amy Clampitt’s invalid-like delicacy. Besides, bad work does not merely lack good properties, like a man who has forgotten to put on socks or a tie, it may promote bad properties as if they were good. The Vendler who is ...”

“... analysis ranges from the study of Tiresias to discussions of contemporary novelists (John Cheever, Stephen Spender and many more) and films. This category often blends into the second, since much of the gossip is about writers who have concealed-and-revealed their bisexuality in their fiction. Exhibit A here is the Bloomsbury saga of Vita Sackville-West ...”

“... of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true worth has yet to be assessed, or because it finally has been. There are also some welcome defining presences. W.S. Graham is well represented with different poems in ...”

“... and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a ...”

“... and country clay. The poet wrote until his dying day. The final nail in the coffin came from Stephen Spender, Day Lewis’s old friend and longest surviving hydra head of Roy Campbell’s monstrous ‘MacSpaunday’, who admitted, writing in 1992 at the time of the long-awaited publication of Day Lewis’s Complete Poems, that while he admired the ...”

“... age begun to feel that his facility undid him. ‘Thomas’s poetry is turned on like a tap,’ Stephen Spender wrote, and Thomas feared as much. ‘It is just poetic stuff,’ Spender said, ‘with no beginning or end, shape, or intelligent and intelligible control.’ Incontinence was not supposed to be a mark of ...”

“... dying? One wonders what is being talked about, whether it is sex, or something less tangible. Stephen Spender once said that, in conversation, when Eliot got on to some unpropitious subject – the weather, or sales of poetry – he would pursue it remorselessly ‘like a tram going through a slum’; and anyone who has read a number of the editorial ...”

“... the Civil War … came back with his illusions intact.’ When, after his own return from Spain, Stephen Spender wrote The New Realism, he summed up a lesson first learned a hundred years before: ‘Writers who have attempted to throw off their bourgeois environment to enter a revolutionary one have only succeeded in uprooting themselves, in getting ...”

“... careful of for the future. It’s the same state of affairs I noticed once when having supper with Stephen Spender, namely that he was telling me lots of stories I knew already. But of course I only knew them because he had already published them in book form. There’s very little in the back of the shop is the message; now that it’s all out on the ...”

“... told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did myself.’ Stephen Spender, who met Jennings in Germany in 1945, noticed the film-maker’s ‘bumptious expression’, as well as his ‘pin-head face’ and ‘flapping ears’. Jennings talked and talked, a great gush of words: about art, theatre and history; about ...”

“... humour has a flintier edge. It is, for example, difficult to miss the disdain in a description of Stephen Spender as ‘a literary mover and shaker, knighted in 1983. His wealthy, artistic parents sent him to various private schools and Oxford, but he left without taking a degree.’ Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in ...”

“... appeared in 1945 (without a manifesto column). Cyril Connolly was in charge of Horizon and Stephen Spender was terribly at large: Encounter was in the offing, with Spender at the helm. The Movement poets were preparing the ground for a new English mannerism, insular, bittersweet, and piously ...”

“... survive because, despite its merits, it ‘mimes transgression but never crosses the boundary’. Stephen Haggard’s Nya is the story of the love between a young man and a 13-year-old girl. Readers of Lolita will imagine such a book as a hotbed of sexual and linguistic transgression. But in Nya nothing untoward happens. Sexual innocence is not even tempted ...”