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. The book also examines Spender's personal life, from the early discovery of the 'secret' of his Jewish ancestry, his two marriages, his sexual ambivalence, his 'free love' days in Germany between the wars and acquiring Dame Edna as a son in law. Finally, an account is given of the two great battles of his last days: his unsuccessful attempt to suppress Hugh David's attempt at a biography and his legal case against the writer David Leavitt whose novel "While England Sleeps", he claimed, plagiarised his own writing.

Sir Stephen Spender (1909-1995): An English poet, critic, lecturer, and professor. His writings often reflect democratic leftist and idealistic qualities, and he is perhaps best well known for his contribution to The God That Failed (1949), a volume of essays by those disillusioned with communism. Though he often romanticized pre-war Germany through his novels and translations of Hölderlin and Schiller, he expressed a fierce hatred of National Socialism. During the Second World War he served in the London Fire Service, and many of his poems reflect his experience amid the flames and destruction that resulted from the German blitz against London. Like Air Raid Across the Bay at Plymouth, To Poets and Airmen is a prime example of the poet’s autobiographical reflections, being a powerful elegy on the iniquity of bombing innocent civilians and the dangers faced by a city’s defenders and rescuers.