“... 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 ...”

“... person and keenly responsive to the literary thinking of his time. (Four Essays is dedicated to Stephen Spender.) But it is William Empson whom I would adduce here as a literary context for Berlin’s pluralism. In a book published in 1951, while discussing the theories of I.A. Richards, Empson comments: ‘It may be that the human mind can recognise ...”

“... acceptances, including from Noel Annan, A.J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra, J.B. Priestley, Stephen Spender, A.J.P. Taylor and Angus Wilson – in the full list, unlike in this sample, the heteros outnumber the homos. Encouraged by this apparently principled and broad-minded response, Dyson set up the Homosexual Law Reform Society, and applied to ...”

“... Carpenter’s excellent life of Auden has a nice turn of phrase in recounting the moment when Stephen Spender, arrived in an Oxford of the later Twenties which was pervaded by the legend of Auden, at last met his fellow undergraduate and ‘found the reality just as remarkable as that legend’. The story appears to have come from ...”

“... a conference on the literature of the Second World War. Asked for suitable names, I recommend Stephen Spender (because of his experience de-Nazifying German libraries after the war) and Alan Ross. When I mention that Ross served in the Navy and, in poems like ‘Murmansk’, recalls the war in the Baltic, Stabnikov seems satisfied. We pass the now ...”

“... pivotal events of the century, a setting-up of sides for the Second World War. Philby, along with Stephen Spender, Hugh Gaitskell, Naomi Mitch-ison, the American journalist John Gunther and many others, was horrified to see the Austrian regular army shelling the workers’ flats in Karl-Marx-Stadt, and readily agreed with his new Communist ...”

“... few other ‘viable places of worship’. London. Writing a review of Auden in Love, I come across Stephen Spender’s story of how Auden made Spender pay for the cigarettes he had bummed off him on Ischia. Spender points out that at other times Auden could be conspicuously ...”

“... that stirred within him when he at tended a John Reed Club in Chicago in the Twenties; and Stephen Spender speaking about being ‘moved by the unemployed’ in Germany in the early Thirties. It would seem, in other words, that it was hopeful sentiment that seduced them into Communism, not rational calculation: their reasons for joining were ...”

“... and blankets for Spain; Patrick Hamilton deserted satirical realism for dystopia and allegory; Stephen Spender meandered Forward from Liberalism, crabwise; Sybil Thorndike joined the board of the Daily Worker; Dylan Thomas insisted that his ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’ must first appear as part of a socialist Mayday feature in 1944. Doris ...”

“... Aspinall’s notable work Politics and the Press (1949) does it for the period 1780 to 1850, and Stephen Koss pays full tribute to his predecessor. Professor Koss is one of the few American historians of the top rank writing about modern British political history (as opposed to pre-revolution English history). He is producing a work which, to judge from ...”

“... have tried to, but it was not until I was 16 and a bit late in the day. Another boy had shown me Stephen Spender’s World Within World, or at any rate the bits dealing with homosexuality, the references to which (while pretty opaque by today’s standards) were thought rather daring in 1951. Spender had been ...”

“... and the ideological attachments jurists bring to their cases. Sands portrays the Australian Percy Spender and the American Stephen Schwebel, two judges who served as president of the ICJ in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, as legally enrobed imperial apologists – though he doesn’t quite call them that. During a case ...”

“... It’s all because they wouldn’t let me play football.Oh dear. You sound like that poem by Stephen Spender, telling the world how scared he was of the rough boys who threw stones.Please don’t. I’d better shut up.You could have been a contender. My point is you did become a contender.In a way, yes. I’m still pretty good at football, except ...”

“... social action. Has the Abbey Theatre done nothing for Ireland?’Many years later, in a letter to Stephen Spender, Auden described Yeats as ‘my own devil of unauthenticity’ and referred to the ‘false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’ in his work. As he embarked on his poem in memory of Yeats, he must have been aware of the kind of ...”

“... about the CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. ...”