Stephen Spender

Although often embroiled in contorversy and public debate, Stephen Spender's all consuming passion was literature. At Oxford he became friendly with Cecil Day Lewis, Louis McNeice, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood and with these writers his name will always be associated. This is a serious literary biography which quotes extensively from Spender's writing and shows its relationship to the major political and social events with which Spender became involved and concerned - the Spanish Civil War, the rise and fall of Marxism, the Second World War and the decline of Britain as a cultural and political force.