Best known as one of the young poets who emerged in the 1930s, Stephen Spender has been at the centre of literary life in Britain and America for more than 60 years. A life-long friend of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, at the beginning of his career he was championed by Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. Later he was to number among his friends intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Gide, musicians including Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky, and artists ranging from Henry Moore to David Hockney. In this full-length study of Spender's life and work, Hugh David presents him in the context of changing times through which he has lived. He vividly recreates an upper-middle-class Edwardian childhood, Spender's Brideshead days at Oxford University as well as the realities of life in the seedy Thirties Berlin of Cabaret, the brutal battlefields of the Spanish Civil War, and the literary salons of pre-war London.