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“... cheered Orwell up in his last three months, according to Anthony Powell, though it greatly annoyed Stephen Spender, who resented being told by a snip of a girl to limit his political conversation with G.O. to twenty minutes. Her next marriage was in 1958 to Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had been jailed four years earlier in the scandalous homosexuality trial ...”

“... was ‘like a gloomy priest presiding over my affections and spontaneity’, and later telling Stephen Spender that Eliot’s reputation had overshadowed his whole life. This reaction to Lewis, Eliot, and Spender himself, to whom, he said, ‘one must be infinitely forgiving’, was purely emotional. ‘Doesn’t ...”

“... and Tchelitchew, when they most needed it. Since his Oxford days – until an adverse review from Stephen Spender destroyed his confidence – he had published poetry (mostly his own) in luxurious limited editions. He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in ...”

“... daunting severity, such as that to J.B. Leishman, who, having fallen out with his collaborator Stephen Spender on the vexed issue of a Rilke translation, suggested that he do it alone. To J.R. Ackerley, as literary editor of the Listener trapped in the BBC machine, he sends comments on that organisation which come from the other side but remind one of ...”

“... himself. Then came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of this piece – a ...”

“... Piper makes us more directly aware of a great architectural tradition burning up,’ Stephen Spender said. Piper – always, temperamentally, happy to comply – went on tour around the country to document burned-out churches as well as picturesque buildings deemed to be under threat, including Windsor Castle, producing a series of dark ...”

“... Afew​ months after the end of the Second World War, Stephen Spender returned to Germany. His plan was to contact German intellectuals. This was not very fruitful: most were dead or in exile, and Ernst Jünger, whom he did meet, evaded his invitation to show unqualified guilt for the Nazi past. But then Spender was asked to reopen libraries in the British zone of occupation, having first purged them of their Nazi staff and Nazi literature ...”

“... only to divide and reassemble in Capri or San Francisco the next. (The peripatetic paradigm is Sir Stephen Spender, but Macdonald made an effort to run him close.) Third, he was an adopter of causes and had a pronounced tendency to look for the orphaned ones. If a thing was already sayable, he would be that much less interested in defending its right to ...”

“... Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was seldom literary. I solicited ...”

“... of the corpse: ‘both merciless and loving’ work, according to the allegedly non-gay writer Stephen Spender in the not so recent book Christopher Isherwood: Last Drawings; both ‘ruthless’ and ‘ghoulish’, according to Bachardy himself in his diary), plus, later on, Bachardy’s own inevitable move into old age must merely have intensified a ...”

“... famous Madrid Writers’ Congress (she and Ackland were the only women in the British delegation). Stephen Spender represented her in his autobiography as ‘a Communist lady novelist’ with a ‘lady poet’ friend; she resembled ‘a vicar’s wife ... graciously forbidding ... She insisted on calling everybody comrade.’ Wendy Mulford improbably ...”

“... two lines of five stressed syllables each.’ Far better judges than I, such as Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender, have admired these books; and Wystan Auden and Leonard Woolf are said to have spoken well of them. Certainly he saw himself as the heir to Virginia Woolf and his novels were written for those who enjoy the long conundrums of Joyce. But after ...”

“... Brenda Maddox’s use of them in her book on Nora, and the iron curtain which in retaliation Stephen Joyce has dropped around his grandfather’s flame. In Professor A.N. Other’s hands, this would have been a duller and more comprehensively researched book. Probably F.R. Leavis is long enough dead (although the keepers of his gem-like flame remain ...”

“... in the look of things. Captain George Nathan was a former British army lieutenant described by Stephen Spender as ‘an elegant, cane-swaggering, likeable type of adventurous Jew’; he’d first appeared in Albacete in ‘an old sweater and cheap shoes’, but once he was made an officer he was transformed. His ‘chin-strap was at the correct ...”

“... writes. Once he was in his late teens, it became fashionable to fall in love with Freud. When Stephen Spender, according to himself, told T.S. Eliot that he had succumbed, Eliot said: ‘There’s nothing I understand more.’ Spender and Freud spent some time in a cottage in Wales when Freud was 18 and produced a ...”