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“... in reverse gear’. In the Police Station our identity was again challenged: ‘Who are you?’ Spender and Grigson. (It happened that the previous day a national newspaper had given publicity to my brother Stephen in some sensationally farfetched connection with Guy Burgess, John Lehmann and other names they hoped to ...”

“... wish to go and are thought capable of staying the course.’ Maud’s pupils in politics included Stephen Spender – who does not seem to have learnt much politics anyway – and if it is not breath-taking, it does at least cause one to reflect on the insularity of the pre-war Oxford school of politics that it was only in 1938 that he ‘spotted’ the ...”

“... have been up when I visited the campus in 1971 just after Amin had taken power. C. Day Lewis and Stephen Spender beam down, as does a young man then called ‘James’ Ngugi, the pride of Makerere, from which he had graduated as the first published East African novelist. This freezing of time has occurred, although (or because) the department was run by ...”

“... word ‘correct’ infecting the harder-line analyses. Writing to Virginia Woolf in 1937, Stephen Spender gave his unvarnished view of the Brigade: ‘The qualities required, apart from courage, are terrific narrowness and a religious dogmatism ... or else toughness, cynicism and insensibility ... the truthful live in Hell there.’ Everything ...”

“... had been expended to bring me to New Mexico, too, along with a group of other British writers – Stephen Spender, Richard Hoggart, Margaret Drabble, Al Alvarez – and various Beat American poets and novelists (California vintage ’57), and academics from different universities, to consider such issues as ‘D. H. Lawrence and his Influence on Modern ...”

“... air-raid warden, was disgusted by the ‘faint susurrus’ of intellectuals dashing for desk jobs. Stephen Spender, he sneered, had ‘feathered his young nest in the Ministry of Information’. Just months later Greene, who embodied in his own tortured personality as many contradictions, deceptions and hypocrisies as the other five combined, avoided ...”

“... Princess Margaret; Yes, he’s madly upper crust. In the minority were those impressed, such as Stephen Spender and William Plomer. Betjeman wrote to the latter thanking him. ‘Fuck Wain and the prig in the Times who was probably Griggers’ – Geoffrey Grigson, another in his rogues’ gallery. ‘I’ve gone away to escape further blows.’ His ...”

“... and when he manages to hit the target, it is almost always a bullseye. Here is his judgment on Stephen Spender: His destiny is to prove that a poem with an impediment of speech, a club foot, and butterfingers, can nevertheless enunciate, hold and pursue the poetic affirmation. His poems are thus good poems because and in spite of the fact that they ...”

“... from the ‘Sehnsucht’ sketchbook in 1887, and sustained by such unlikely commentators as Stephen Spender (whom Lockwood quotes), that Beethoven’s first ideas were clumsy and could be refined into masterpieces only by a generalised sort of titanic struggle. Instead of losing himself in pious admiration of Beethoven’s persistence in building ...”

“... for the lighter but more efficient cane: much relish here in the details. ‘Dick’ moans to Stephen Spender: ‘Even if I become prime minister, I’ll never again be as great as I was at Winchester.’ ‘Dick’ is immortalised by John Betjeman: Broad of Church and Broad of Mind, Broad Before and Broad Behind. ‘Dick’ competes with Auden for ...”

“... and Auden, it seems, was mildly disparaging about Billy Budd. The final break came, according to Stephen Spender, when Auden wrote criticising some particular setting of words – Mitchell thinks it was a passage from Gloriana – and had his letter returned to him torn to pieces. He was very upset. But Britten was remorseless – he even dropped people ...”

“... a prurient interest in Jeffrey Archer’s spotty back and T.S. Eliot’s rupture truss (to which Stephen Spender enigmatically refers) mingles with a pious desire to be as well-informed as possible. On the whole, I’m not entirely sorry to be led from temptation by Jones’s obedient vandalism or Valerie Eliot’s stonewall around her husband’s ...”

“... of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true worth has yet to be assessed, or because it finally has been. There are also some welcome defining presences. W.S. Graham is well represented with different poems in ...”

“... Office’s Information and Research Department. Kingsley Martin: Decayed liberal. Very dishonest; Stephen Spender: Sentimental Sympathiser and very unreliable; Ian Mikardo: I don’t know much about him, but have sometimes wondered; Richard Crossman: ??Political climber. Zionist (appears sincere about this). Too dishonest to be outright FT. Nearly all ...”

“... draws on, T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (1967). For the contributors to that volume, among them Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée, were all allowed to quote from Eliot’s correspondence. Compare Ackroyd with what Ackroyd was presumably not allowed to publish although it had previously been published (this being what I mean by ...”