"Nine years after Stephen Spender's death, John Sutherland offers the authorized life of this brilliant but famously enigmatic man." "Sutherland's account ranges from the depiction of Spender's cosmopolitan family (and the dominant influence of this archetypal Victorian father), via Oxford, to the breakaway years in 1930s Weimar Germany, where his comrades in liberated exile were W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. We follow him through the war as Britain's most famous fireman to the postwar years of international celebrity - a celebrity which provoked some animosity; Spender's reputation is among the most unfairly contested of its time, but of all the great writers of the 1930s he lived longest and most fully."