Stephen Spender, the son of a journalist, was born in London in 1909. His post-war memoir World within World was recognised as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to have come out of the 1930s and 1940s, distilling a distinctively personal, humanistic socialism.
Reordering the thematic principle of the 1985 Collected Poems, this edition returns to a book-by-book chronology and allows the reader to experience, for the first time, the full development and range of his career.