He was two or three years younger than the group of Trinity College communists including Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and James Klugmann.

He had previously been in a relationship with a Welsh woman, Rachel (Ray) Peters, with whom he had a child, James Cornford, later adopted by John's parents.

[5] The following month he returned to England, where he recruited twenty-one British volunteers,[6] including Bernard Knox, John Sommerfield, Chris Thorneycroft and Griffin Maclaurin.

He served with a machine-gun unit of the Commune de Paris Battalion, and fought alongside a number of other British volunteers in the defence of Madrid through November and December 1936, including Esmond Romilly.

[8] During the Battle of Ciudad Universitaria he was wounded in the head by shrapnel, but he refused to rest and, after twenty-four hours in hospital, returned to the front.

In the Battle of Boadilla del Monte in December his unit for the first time faced massed German troops, and under heavy bombardment were forced to retreat twelve kilometres in twenty-four hours.

One justification for this claim is the following passage from George Orwell's 1940 essay "My Country Right or Left": "Let anyone compare the poem John Cornford wrote not long before he was killed ('Before the Storming of Huesca') with Sir Henry Newbolt's ‘There's a breathless hush in the close tonight’.

[citation needed] British critic Stan Smith, in his essay "'Hard As the Metal of My Gun': John Cornford's Spain",[13] undertakes a detailed reading of "Full Moon at Tierz" that brings out its complexity and ambivalence.

The poem begins with a Marxist and modernist vision of history as a mountain glacier where "[t]ime was inches, dark was all" until it reaches "[t]he dialectic's point of change" and "crashes in light and minutes to its fall."

Certainly, despite its far wider focus and dense philosophical imagery, the poem so far is, like Newbolt's, an expression of determination, as the final stanza of this section shows: "Time future, has no image in space, Crooked as the road that we must tread, Straight as our bullets fly ahead.

(Oviedo is a city in Northern Spain where miners had already taken up arms against the dictatorship that preceded the Second Spanish Republic; the Mauser is a type of rifle.)

Smith discusses what he calls "the paradoxical fusion of solidarity and solitude in a single line at the heart of 'Full Moon at Tierz': 'Now with my Party, I stand quite alone'.

"[16] In his 1942 introduction to The Fury of the Living, a collection of poems by John Singer, Hugh MacDiarmid calls Cornford (along with Christopher Caudwell, another young writer killed fighting in Spain), one of the 'few inspiring exceptions' from the 'leftist poets of the comfortable classes'.

[19] His rapid elevation was controversial, given his lack of a doctorate, his slender publications record (one book chapter and a journal article), and his family's close acquaintance with the university's then vice-chancellor, Michael Swann.

[20] Resigning in 1976 to join the Outer Circle Policy Unit (a creation of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust), Cornford went on to lead a variety of organizations, including the Nuffield Foundation, the Campaign for Freedom of Information (1984–1997), the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and the Institute for Public Policy Research, as well as becoming the literary editor and later chairman of The Political Quarterly academic journal.