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“... response to the drama at the centre of which she stands. One is almost driven to sympathise with Stephen Spender, who took the painting as an allegory of Venus acting as matchmaker for a shy young woman, pushed forward by Boreas, and a standoffish young man, represented by Mercury. Opacity has a provocation all its own. But opacity, like ignorance, can ...”

“... as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted my ideal for my real one’ – an admission of 1994 ...”

“... one’s thinks to be all thanks. In the tribute that came out the year after his death, edited by Stephen Spender, much was made of how cosy he was. He grows less cosy by the memoir, even if one like Ms Farnan’s is less than fair. Particularly hard to take is the ‘All do as I do’ side of him that early on bullied off Britten. It’s a masculine ...”

“... Club, precursor of International Pen, but finds its literary milieu ‘alarmingly refined’ (Stephen Spender lectures on Poetic Drama, ‘loathing the suburbs’). She gives up the Daily Mail and starts reading the New Statesman. In 1936 her father dies unexpectedly. At 26 Jean has £300 a year, rent from the family home, and a portfolio of stocks ...”

“... symptoms is recapitulated or mimicked by Eliot in another account of creative reading. A letter to Stephen Spender on this topic has, since its publication in 1966, become famous: ‘Even just the bewildering minute counts; you have to give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say, before you have wholly ...”

“... from the Chronicle, and parlay his continuing existence – here after all was something like the Stephen Spender of modernism, he had known Yeats, was an associate of Pound’s, could remember Eliot as a progressive – into readings and teaching jobs in America, grants from the Arts Council and Northern Arts, radio and television appearances on the ...”

“... Warner wrote the introduction). When Hockney’s prints were published a few years later, in 1967, Stephen Spender, a friend and early advocate, collaborated on a new translation with the publisher Nikos Stangos, himself Greek and a poet, of 14 of the Cavafy poems, which were illustrated by 12 of the etchings. The transmission of the poems, from the ...”

“... it seemingly qualifies as a statement of fact. No contradiction is offered, for example, when ‘Spender’ is listed as the editor of the Morning Leader, and anyone who checks the index to ascertain which Spender – J.A. or Harold – has been thus misidentified will discover both to be among the missing entries. More to ...”

“... International Congress of Intellectuals for the Defence of Culture took place in Madrid in 1937, Stephen Spender recalled that the unstated theme of the meeting was the Stalinists v. André Gide. Although Alan Sheridan modestly asserts that he has ‘no theory about André Gide’, he renders him with a wealth of telling detail as a fearless crusader ...”

“... conducts a farcical tour of eminent writers, which reaches its climax in a mountain temple, where Stephen Spender and Angus Wilson look on as an enema is administered on the tatami to a haemorrhoidal Alberto Moravia. The indifference and obliviousness of these literary celebrities find their epitome in Truman Capote. ‘I have seen Japan,’ he announces ...”

“... of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring ...”

“... think action generally unreal. Its the thing we do in the dark that is more real,’ she wrote to Spender. It was very important to her to know that she had the capacity to construct a veneer for herself that would allow her to be among people, to be admired and celebrated. But her anxieties were never entirely stilled: she continued to feel a horror that ...”

“... of the most interesting comments that Pasternak ever made on his art, in a letter in English to Stephen Spender: ‘Nineteenth-century art, either in painting or poetry but above all in the great novels of the period, is fixed in narratives which are irrevocable, like verdicts or sentences, beyond recall.’ The fixedness is that of the individual, the ...”

“... deep sea keep you up. The second edition of Science and Poetry had not been out a year before Stephen Spender entitled his book on modern writers and belief (or unbelief) The Destructive Element, describing Richards’s note as ‘a focal point from which diverge rays towards past and future’. Certainly Conrad’s words give some insight into ...”

“... and left to fend for yourself. The opening poem of his first collection – privately printed by Stephen Spender in 1928 – sets and upsets the scene:The sprinkler on the lawnWeaves a cool vertigo, and stumps are drawn;The last boy vanishes,A blazer half-on, through the rigid trees.This isn’t quite cricket. We may approve the orderly syllable ...”