In a well-known letter of George Orwell's to Stephen Spender, Orwell tells Spender that before he met him he had put him down as a Communist or Communist sympathizer and "a sort of fashionable successful person," but now that he has met him he has had to change his mind. "Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude," Orwell writes, "because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas." Orwell concludes: "It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to, like the Labour M.Ps. who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more."