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“... In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender of Horizon, Craxton found a friend, an indulgent patron and a way into the avant-garde. He had a narrow brush with conscription, from which he was exempted because, according to the sergeant who gave him the news, ‘You’d be as much use to ...”

“... and mass killings. Yet it still gives me an eerie feeling to read about people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Raymond Aron, to say nothing of less admirable characters of the Melvin Lasky stripe, taking part in surreptitiously subsidised anti-Communist ventures – magazines, symphony orchestras, art exhibitions – or in the setting up of ...”

“... the late Goronwy Rees gave a version of their flight to the People than by the flight itself. When Stephen Spender showed the Daily Express a friend’s letter about Burgess, he was held to have disgraced himself. This book is a great feat. Andrew Boyle went through archives and memoirs in two continents, but above all persuaded people to talk – people ...”

“... sphinx without a secret,’ said Truman Capote; ‘the Ecce Homo of modern exhibitionism,’ said Stephen Spender. For his own part, Warhol was intensely reasonable: ‘I just want to be a machine,’ he said. There were many Andies: the Andy who brought cruelty back into art; the Andy who worried about ‘boy trouble’; the Andy who saw to the heart of ...”

“... influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame or both, some not: but then, not now, was their moment. Was Connolly himself any good as a writer? The question means little because the point of Connolly turned out ...”

“... many subject which have been part of their friendships with him. Of the 14 essays and one poem (by Stephen Spender) three have previously been published. Alfred Brendel writes about humour in music, Francis Haskell on controversies about the transition from Late Roman to Early Christian art; Bernard Williams, in a wonderful and unsummarisable essay called ...”

“... Milne and Lord Berners, and ‘The Child at Home’, discussing Victor Gollancz, Augustus Hare, Stephen Spender, Winifred Foley and Neville Cardus. These categories are speculative instruments rather than immutable structures, and they might give way if pressed too hard: but they provide a genuinely helpful way of organising the material. Cockshut ...”

“... to give figurative painting seriousness and weight. As it is, Wyndham Lewis’s portrait of Stephen Spender upstages a row of portraits by Lamb, Coldstream and John because of its linear clarity and bite, and a Matthew Smith holds your eye by force of juicy paint and saturated colour alone. Yet thin paint in the work of Stanley Spencer and Paul ...”

“... What​ became of his face? In his memorial address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image of Wystan … of course one with which you are all familiar: the famous poet with the face like a map of physical geography, criss-crossed and river-run and creased with lines ...”

“... your beautiful saintly soul.’ Eliot was a creature of habit: in the mornings, communion at St Stephen’s; in the afternoons, business at Faber, dictating innumerable letters; writing in the evenings; rosaries in the early hours. Letters to Emily, typed from his desk, were a vital part of his amatory and auditory imagination – part of the rhythm of his ...”

“... was two). She goes to parties with his rather pre-war friends, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender. She has an affair with Lucian Freud, she visits Oxford, becomes pregnant and marries into a more modern set: her husband, a friend of Ken Tynan and Kingsley Amis, has to be indoctrinated into her mother’s religion by the time-honoured ...”

“... in Paris with a CIA agent as its executive secretary and launched Encounter, initially edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol. It attracted a host of leftish public intellectual luminaries as contributors, including Arthur Koestler, who in 1950 inaugurated the CCF at its opening congress in Berlin with a ‘Manifesto for ...”

“... her much better than we really did. John Lehmann, writing of his early meetings with the young Stephen Spender, described Spender as ‘the most rapidly self-revealing person I had ever met’. Something of the sort might be said about Stevie: but one was simultaneously aware of a great deal that was not ...”

“... Charles Douglas-Home, Andrew Knight (the editor of the Economist), Frank Giles, Richard Kershaw, Stephen Spender and others eat and drink their way, sometimes to Tehran, but never, it would seem, to saying anything very interesting or useful. A string of right-wing Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill ...”

“... had folded and been replaced after a while by Encounter, funded by the CIA, unknown to its editor Stephen Spender or to Cyril, whose intermittently oppressive patronage Spender seems to have borne with remarkable kindness and forbearance. He was to publish Connolly’s last and unfinished attempt in his own inimitable ...”