"Poet, autobiographer, literary critic, journalist, and art critic, Stephen Spender was also a social commentator and friend to many of the key thinkers of the modernist and post-modernist periods. David Leeming's portrait captures the life while also offering a study of some of modernism's most original ideas and personalities and a close look at the intersections between art and politics. "--BOOK JACKET. "The events and experiences that significantly marked Spender's life are at the center of this biography: vividly recaptured, they range from the decay of British upper-class liberalism and the disappointments of the Spanish Civil War to the rise and fall of Marxism and Nazism. The bombings of London during World War II, the Cold War and the human rights struggle, the Vietnam protest movement and the 1960s sexual revolution in America and abroad, and the decline of England as a cultural and political force are parts of this narrative. "--BOOK JACKET.