RESULTS

One of our best-known and best-loved literary critics turns his attention to the more bizarre areas of literature in this miscellany of fact and trivia. Which author had the heaviest brain? Whose manuscript was inadvertently used to light a fire? What was the original title of 1984? This is the ideal anthology of useless information for all literary devotees.

Seven years after Stephen Spender's death, John Sutherland offers the authorised 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 his 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 lived most fully. Stephen Spender was, and still is, a controversial figure. One thing is, however, irrefutable. Anyone who was anyone, in literary or cultural terms, crossed his path: the pageant of his friends, acquaintances (and, sometimes, antagonists) includes Isaiah Berlin, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Cyril Connolly.