[Parker is an English nonfiction writer and biographer. In the following tribute, he remarks on Spender's character.]

In 1974 I arrived at University College London to read English, I had devoured Christopher Isherwood's Berlin books at school and had just seen Cabaret for the third time, and now I could attend commentary and analysis seminars conducted by Stephen Spender. On one occasion we were looking at a poem by WH Auden, and I remember thinking: but this man actually knew Auden; he may even have read the poem in manuscript at the time it was written.

Whether he had or not, Spender (who died last Sunday [July 16]) seemed far more interested in what a group of gauche students had to say about it than in providing his own, privileged insights, and had to be coaxed into a personal response. It was this modesty, this genuine interest in what other people might think, that made him such a good teacher.

It also made him extremely good company, as I discovered when I started working on a biography of Isherwood, and found myself asking the sort of questions I'm glad I hadn't at UCL. What was Sally Bowles 'really like'? And what about Otto Nowak? And Mr Norris? And all the other people whom I needed to disentangle from Isherwood's beguiling portraits of them?

Spender's vagueness was legendary, but like much else about him, starting with his height, it seemed exaggerated. Having outlived the majority of his literary contemporaries, he spent a great deal of time answering questions about them, almost always with immense patience, courtesy and good humour. His own bruising experiences as the subject of a soidisant biography made him understandably cautious when dealing with people seeking information, and he was quite capable of depolying strategic amnesia in order to avoid answering questions.

His astuteness was immediately apparent when I first arranged to question him about Isherwood. He invited me to lunch at the Savile Club, plied me with drink, and rattled off a number of indiscreet recollections and observations, perfectly well aware that club rules prevented me from taking notes.

This was a sort of game, or perhaps a test, and later conversations, both on and off the record, provided the sort of insights about people that could have been reached only after knowing them really intimately and thinking about their characters for many years. 'Oh dear,' he would say in mock-alarm, gesturing at my silently eavesdropping tape-recorder, 'Is that thing still on?'

It was not merely that he had lived such a long time that made him a vital witness of the past, however. His observations were always acute and usually very funny. 'The trouble with the Lehmanns,' he once said, 'is that they think they're the Brontës, when they're really the Marx Brothers.' His analysis of both friends and foes arose from a genuine interest in human nature, and he would frequently qualify or refine his thoughts, the phone sometimes ringing weeks later: 'I've been thinking again about Christopher …'

Obituaries have described Stephen Spender as 'the last link of a golden generation', which is not strictly true (happily, Edward Upward is still alive and still writing at the age of 91). He did, however, represent continuity, partly because, unlike Auden and Isherwood whose emigration to America in 1939 sealed off the decade, he remained swimming in the strong current of English literary life right up until his death. Indeed, although it seems absurd to suggest that someone who lived into his eighty-sixth year died before his time, what many people are now mourning is not so much the loss of a causeway to the past, as the shocking disappearance of someone who was very much of the present.

Of the triumvirate that dominated the Thirties, Spender was at once the most sympathetic and the most representative. Auden's brilliant dogmatism and Isherwood's stylish aloofness are as fresh today as they ever were, but what Spender diagnosed as his own 'combination of convinctions and hesitation', particularly as recounted in his recklessly frank autobiography, World Within World (1951), most accurately reflects the idealism and confusion of the decade.

This willing self-exposure often made Spender seem foolish, but while many unkind things were said about him during his long and very public life, few were as damning (or as funny) as the things he said about himself. Far from self-aggrandising, his stories about the famous people he had known usually displayed him at a disadvantage. 'In my deepest friendships,' he wrote in a characteristic essay, 'I have been conscious of being "taken with a pinch of salt". Sometimes it is disconcerting to be laughed at when one is serious, but as long as it is done affectionately, one is grateful to people who enable one to see oneself a little from the outside.'