World Within World, by Stephen Spender

This autobiography by the well-known British poet was completed in 1950, when he was 41. He meets the objection that he was too young to sum up his life by explaining that “events both public and private tended to make my pre-war life seem complete in itself”, the public event being the end of WWII. John Bayley, in his introduction calls the book “the best autobiography in English written in the twentieth century.”

I have not read widely enough to assess that claim, but it is certainly very f...