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“... theatres, farmers’ markets, is called, with alliterative and poetic overkill, Spenser Spender. ‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.’ In conjuring Eliot’s footnoting of the Elizabethan poet in The Waste Land, Ackroyd suggests a genealogy of river writers, an assemblage of quotation and reference. He also prepared the ground for the ...”

“... At the end of his two-volume biography, Stephen Walsh writes that Igor Stravinsky’s music is ‘the one unquestioned staple of the modern repertoire, the body of work that, more than any other, stands as an icon of 20th-century musical thought and imagery’. There couldn’t be a richer subject for a musical biographer and Walsh admits to having an obsession with his subject ...”

“... a more general difficulty: that of setting up a new order in the old vocabulary of Leavis and Stephen I-think-continually-of-those-who-were-truly-great Spender. Charlotte Mew, who was born on the edge of the square (and rather surprisingly does have a plaque), might have prompted some different adjectives. I wish Wade ...”

“... everybody, not least the barmen, spoke exactly like her. ‘I don’t know why they call her Spender,’ Muriel said of the poet in his scampering years, before he became Sir Stephen. ‘She never puts her hand in her pocket.’ Members felt that drinking anywhere else wasn’t really drinking. Coffield’s book is a ...”

“... felt completely unselfconscious.’ Then there is Tommy or Tommie or Tony Hyndman, also a lover of Stephen Spender’s (who calls him Jimmy Younger in World within World) and a character in T.C. Worseley’s autobiographical novel Fellow Travellers (Worseley calls him Harry Watson). But Strachan’s intention is always to give Redgrave the benefit of his ...”

“... I’m going to tremendous, Basil Fawltyish lengths to avoid being introduced to Sir Stephen Spender,’ whose collected poems he had just given an unglowing review. ‘Tremendous, Basil Fawltyish lengths’: that phrase stuck with me. It comes to mind when I look at Anglo-Saxon attempts to address the crises in their respective financial ...”

“... Fornes had it at her sparky fingertips. As an artist she was the real McCoy, Sontag’s friend Stephen Koch observed: ‘Not a pretend one, and not a critic, and not a discussant, and not a graduate student making notes.’ She was, in short, a natural. When it came to sex and art and many basic day-to-day activities, Sontag wasn’t a natural, being ...”

“... Hamilton was against my saying so, but I feel there was something good there from time to time, in Spender. Like that poem about the aeroplane …HEANEY: ‘The Landscape Near an Aerodrome’.MILLER: That’s right.O’HAGAN: About the plane descending to the feminine land, lulled into miles of softness.MILLER: Yes, he could be good, when not in his ‘I think ...”