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Short books to read when you’re overwhelmed

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20 books everyone should read in their forties

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From page to screen: gay love in cinema

Prater Violet

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W.H Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939. He died on 4 January 1986. His novel A Single Man was recently made into an award-winning film by Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore

With one impatient phone call, a young Christopher Isherwood is drawn into the film industry. 
 
On the other end of the line is temperamental Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann. Christopher&rsquo;s job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet. Meanwhile, in the real Vienna of 1934, the Austrian right crushes a socialist uprising. Bergmann is distraught; his prophecy of a coming war goes unheeded. As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project, and Hitler&rsquo;s shadow lengthens over Europe. 
 
&lsquo;A masterly novella&rsquo; Guardian 
 
&lsquo;A deliberate historical parable. Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence&rsquo; New Yorker

A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W.H Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939. He died on 4 January 1986.

George is heartbroken after the death of his lover. 
 
An English professor in suburban California, George must now adjust to a tragic new solitude in the sun. Beneath George&rsquo;s rigid British restraint, waves of sorrow and fury surge. He doggedly persists with the routines of his past life, heading out to work, to the gym, on again to dinner. Yet along the way, George rediscovers the unexpected pleasures of life and the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation. This short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TOM FORD 
 
&lsquo;Lyrical and intensely moving&rsquo; Daily Telegraph 
 
&lsquo;Widely recognised as his supreme achievement . . . a work of compressed brilliance&rsquo; Guardian 
 
&lsquo;A virtuoso piece of work . . . powerful&rsquo; Sunday Time

Goodbye to Berlin

1930s Berlin is a realm of glamour and sleaze, excess and repression. 
 
Having moved to the city to work on his novel, Christopher finds himself immersed in a world of contradiction. He becomes enamoured with the local denizens and the colourful lives they lead, meeting an English upper-class waif, the delightfully decadent Sally Bowles; a couple &ndash; Peter and Otto &ndash; who are struggling with their sexual identities; and a distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the Landauers. With the Nazis rising to power, Christopher&rsquo;s Berlin is a sparkling city perched on the edge of an abyss. 
 
&lsquo;Isherwood is a master&rsquo; Evening Standard 
 
&lsquo;Brilliant sketches of a society in decay&rsquo; George Orwell 
 
&lsquo;Reading this novel is much like overhearing anecdotes in a crowded bar while history knocks impatiently at the windows&rsquo; Guardian

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904 and moved to America where he took up formal citizenship in 1946. His many famous works include Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin.

As Cabaret returns to the West End, revisit the KitKat Club in the book that introduced Sally Bowles to the world. 
 
Set in the 1930s, Goodbye to Berlin is the novella that inspired Cabaret, evoking the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people under threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles. 
 
'Brilliant sketches of a society in decay' George Orwell 
 
'Isherwood is a master of the emotionally cathartic moment, funny and perspicacious' Evening Standard

Christopher and His Kind

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W.H Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939. He died on 4 January 1986. His novel A Single Man was recently made into an award-winning film by Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

In 1929, Christopher Isherwood leaves England on a one-way ticket to Berlin. 
 
He is determined to become a permanent foreigner, to lose himself &ndash; and discover his sexuality &ndash; in the boy bars of Berlin. The next ten years will be the most memorable of Isherwood&rsquo;s life. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood depicts the decadence of the city&rsquo;s night scene and his route to sexual liberation. Yet something dark looms on the horizon. As the Nazis rise to power, Isherwood recounts his dramatic struggle to save his partner Heinz from persecution. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GORE VIDAL 
 
&lsquo;A truly masterly writer&rsquo; New York Times 
 
&lsquo;A brilliant literary memoir&rsquo; Gore Vidal 
 
&lsquo;Isherwood at his best&rsquo; New Statesman

Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

The Animals

The love story between writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy -- in their own words

Rewarding in all sorts of unexpected ways and a welcome addition to our knowledge and understanding of two very complex, talented and ambitious men

It is a fascinating sociological document while, like most exchanges between two people wrapped up in the tantalizing subject of themselves and each other, lacking very much real interest in the wider world

Thanks to The Animals, Isherwood's devotion lives on

[Isherwood and Bachardy's] letters to each other must be the silliest in modern literature and none the less entertaining for that

Isherwood completists will pounce on The Animals

An extraordinarily full account of a relationship which had to negotiate not just repeated separations but prejudice as well

Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. Born in Cheshire, England, he left Cambridge without graduating, and went to Berlin (‘Berlin meant Boys’) where he wrote Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based. He emigrated to America with W.H. Auden in 1939; whilst Wystan stayed in New York, Chris struck out for California and became a US citizen in 1946. He became involved with Don Bachardy on Valentine’s Day 1953 and their life together is chronicled in Isherwood’s later Diaries. Bachardy (b.1934, Los Angeles) pursued a successful career as a portrait artist and Isherwood went on to write another five novels including A Single Man (which was made into a movie directed by Tom Ford in 2009). In the 1960s and ‘70s he turned to autobiographical works including Kathleen and Frank and Christopher and His Kind. Don continues to live in the house which he shared with Chris for 33 years, overlooking Santa Monica Canyon. 
 
Katherine Bucknell is editor of all four volumes of Christopher Isherwood's Diaries and of W.H.Auden's Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. She is co-editor of Auden Studies and a founder of the W.H.Auden Society. She is also the author of four novels and is currently working on a major new biography of Christopher Isherwood. www.katherinebucknell.com

Christopher Isherwood was a celebrated English writer when he met the Californian teenager Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. They spent their first night together on Valentine’s Day 1953. Defying the conventions, the two men began living as an openly gay couple in an otherwise closeted Hollywood. The Animals provides a loving testimony of an extraordinary relationship that lasted until Chris’s death in 1986 – and survived affairs (on both sides) and a thirty-year-age-gap. 
 
In romantic letters to one another, the couple created the private world of the Animals. Chris was Dobbin, a stubborn old workhorse; Don was the playful young white cat, Kitty. But Don needed to carve out his own identity – some of their longest sequences of letters were exchanged during his trips to London and New York, to pursue his career as an artist and to widen his emotional and sexual horizons. 
 
Amidst the intimate domestic dramas, we learn of Isherwood’s continuing literary success –the royalty cheques from Cabaret, the acclaim for his pioneering novel A Single Man – and the bohemian whirl of Californian film suppers and beach life. Don, whose portraits of London theatreland were making his name, attends the world premiere of The Innocents with Truman Capote and afterwards dines with Deborah Kerr and the rest of the cast, spends weekends with Tennessee Williams, Cecil Beton, or the Earl and Countess of Harewood, and tours Egypt and Greece with a new love interest. But whatever happens in the outside world, Dobbin and Kitty always return to their ‘Basket’ and to each other. Candid, gossipy, exceptionally affectionate, The Animals is a unique interplay between two creative spirits, confident in their mutual devotion.

Diaries Vol 3

Liberation

Hilarious and often deeply moving, the final volume of Christopher Isherwood's extraordinary diaries chronicles the 1970s, with a preface by Edmund White

Sharp and often very funny...marvellous and marveling

Meticulously and lovingly edited by Katherine Bucknell…at its best his prose still seems fresh and in the moment

Isherwood's is an exemplary twentieth-century life: assured and neurotic, fearless and fretful, generous and small-minded, forgiving and remorsefully judgemental.

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in Berlin and writing the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based. He moved to America in 1939, becoming a US citizen in 1946, and wrote another five novels, including Down There on a Visit and A Single Man, a travel book about South America and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the late 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works: Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.

In this final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries, capstone of a million-word masterwork, he greets advancing age with poignant humour and an unquenchable appetite for the new. Isherwood journeyed and changed with his century, until, by the 1980s, he was celebrated as the finest prose writer in English and the Grand Old Man of Gay Liberation. The mainstays of his mature contentment, his Hindu guru, Swami Prabhavananda and his long term companion, Don Bachardy, draw from him an unexpected high tide of joy and love. 
 
Gifted friends both anonymous and infamous take a turn through Isherwood's densely populated human comedy, sketched with ruthlessness and benevolence against the background of the Vietnam War and the Nixon, Carter and Reagan White Houses. Bachardy’s burgeoning career pulled Isherwood into the 1970s art scene where we meet Rauschenberg, Ruscha, and Warhol (serving fetid meat for lunch) as well as Hockney (adored) and Kitaj. Frpm Hollywood and the worlds of music and letters enter John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John Travolta, John Voight, Elton John, David Bowie, Joan Didion and Armistead Maupin. 
 
These are the most concrete and the most mysterious of his diaries, candidly revealing the fear of death that crowded in past Isherwood’s fame, and showing how his life-long immersion in the day-to-day lifted him, paradoxically, toward transcendence.

My Guru and His Disciple

First published in 1980, Isherwood’s overlooked last book is central to an understanding of his life and work.

Isherwood has reinvented the spirit of devotion for the modern reader. If I had to propose a candidate for canonization, Isherwood - wry, self-conscious, scrupulously honest - would get my vote

What emerges is a record of a religious adventure that would have delighted Kierkegaard... Isherwood rejects conventional piety - all the humdrum apparatus of worship - in favor of a direct, even jaunty appreciation of how preposterous, certainly precarious, spirituality can be today.

The sacred and the profane collide like never before

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W.H Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939. He died on 4 January 1986. His novel A Single Man was recently made into an award-winning film by Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY SIMON CALLOW 
 
In 1939, as Europe approaches war, Isherwood, an instinctive pacifist, travels west to California, seeking a new set of beliefs to replace the failed Leftism of the thirties. There he meets Swami Prabhavananda, a Hindu monk, who will become his spiritual guide for the next thirty-seven years. Late-night drinking sessions, free love, and the glamour of writing for the Hollywood studios alternate with meditation, abstinence and the study of religious texts in a compelling tug of war between worldliness and holiness.

Lions and Shadows

Isherwood's evocative and sensitive account of childhood and youth in the 1920s.

The writing is, as always, very clear, very moving and very funny

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in Berlin and writing the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based. He moved to America in 1939, becoming a US citizen in 1946, and wrote another five novels, including Down There on a Visit and A Single Man, a travel book about South America and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the late 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works: Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FENTON 
 
Subtitled 'An education in the twenties', this work blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious public school boy to Cambridge drop-out at large in London’s Bohemia. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Isherwood’s contemporaries Auden, Upward, and Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion shaped the literary identity of England in the 1930s. Witty and outrageous, Isherwood pokes fun at the stars of his generation, above all himself, even as he testifies to their unique early gifts.

The Condor and the Cows

First published in 1949, this is a lively memoir of Isherwood's South American travels

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W.H Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939. He died on 4 January 1986. His novel A Single Man was recently made into an award-winning film by Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PICO IYER 
 
In September 1947, long before mass tourism and with no knowledge of Spanish, Christopher Isherwood and William Caskey left for a six-month tour of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. The Condor and the Cows is Isherwood’s unsentimental and wonderfully rich account of that journey, during which he bumped into a handful of old acquaintances on a brand-new continent.

Kathleen and Frank

First published in 1971, this is a key book in Isherwood's career revealing as much about him as the parents he set out to portray.

Shows a deeper understanding of much that he had once rebelled against

A moving account of his parents' marriage based on their letters and diaries

A social history of the first half of the twentieth century and a study of artistic megalomania... Christopher writes about Christopher with fine, clear, cool precision

There emerge from this book three remarkable characters, two highly edifying, one a writer of compelling talent

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W.H Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939. He died on 4 January 1986. His novel A Single Man was recently made into an award-winning film by Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

This is the story of Christopher Isherwood’s parents – their meeting in 1895, marriage in 1903 after his father had returned from the Boer War, and his father’s death in an assault on Ypres in 1915, which left his mother a widow until her own death in 1960. As well as a family memoir, it is a social history of a period of striking change, and a portrait of the world which shaped Isherwood and which he rejected.

Down There on a Visit

Four narrators, all known as 'Christopher Isherwood', in different locations and periods of time, paint portraits of their own private sexual hells

In several respects this is probably Isherwood's best novel. It offers the sheer pleasure of writing completely personal and yet completely controlled, radiant with observation, never wasting a word, funny and sympathetic

This excellent novel may be the best Christopher Isherwood has written. A deeply intelligent and quietly compelling story

Few writers have so unsparingly scrutinized their worlds. Down There on a Visit is outrageous, bitter, bleak, angry, wry, revealing, infuriating, and at times marvellously comic. An offbeat classic

A bemused, sometimes acid portrait of people caught in private sexual hells of their own making. Its four episodes are connected by four narrators. All are called "Christopher Isherwood, " but each is a different character inhabiting a new setting: Berlin in 1928, the Greek Isles in 1933, London in 1938, and California in 1940. Down There on a Visit is a major work that shows Isherwood at the height of his literary powers.

That young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W.H. Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939. He died on 4 January 1986. His novel A Single Man was made into an award-winning film by Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY PHILIP HENSHER 
 
Berlin, the Greek Islands, London and California. 1928, 1932, 1938 and 1940. Four portraits, four settings, four narrators, all known as 'Christopher Isherwood'. Often regarded as the best of his novels, Down There on a Visit tells the vivid stories of Isherwood's life that, together with The Berlin Novels, were to have comprised his great unfinished epic novel.

The World in the Evening

The best prose writer in English’ Gore Vidal

W H AUDEN, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, C Day Lewis. The brat-pack of their day. They are still considered by many to have been the great writers of the 1930s... Isherwood alone produced his greatest work during the thirties - Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), Lions and Shadows (1938), Goodbye to Berlin (1939) - and yet more than any of the others he deserves to be regarded as a quintessentially modern writer, a writer with whom we can identify, a writer whose life was his work, and vice-versa.

At a party in the Hollywood Hills, Stephen Monk finds his wife in the arms of another man. Betrayed and furious, he packs his belongings and returns to the home he was born in. There he begins to retrace the steps that have brought him to this crisis. He is reminded of his own betrayals and weaknesses. But most of all, the memory of his lost love, Elizabeth Rydal, haunts him. Can he forgive his wife, and most importantly, himself?

A Meeting by the River

A deeply satisfying novel of sibling rivalry, sexuality and spirituality.

The classical opposition between the good brother and the bad one convinces… you believe in them

A radiant novel of mystical devotion and worldly desire by a master of English prose

Brilliant, vital, challenging . . . very strange and very lovely

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical Cabaret. Isherwood travelled with W.H Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America in 1939. He died on 4 January 1986. His novel A Single Man was recently made into an award-winning film by Tom Ford, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore

Breaking a long silence Oliver, a young Englishman, writes to his elder brother, Patrick. Oliver, the idealistic younger brother is living in a Hindu Monastery and has decided to take his final monastic vows. Patrick, a successful, long-married publisher, newly in love with a boy in Los Angeles, decides to visit Oliver to persuade him not renounce the world. 
 
First published in 1967, A Meeting by the River exposes the complex rivalries of sibling relationships and dramatises the conflict between sexuality and spirituality.

All the Conspirators

Christopher Isherwood's debut novel which features the first generation of Angry Young Men

In Isherwood's work, a magic potion of history and invention, the voice is clear, and, no matter how many times we hear it, it always seems to be speaking for the first time

The scene is 1920s Kensington and Philip and Joan are testing the very limits of politeness and restraint as they fight to expunge the oppression of their mother - by whatever means necessary. In his first novel, Christopher Isherwood paints an intimate portrait of the battle between old and young as he explores the destruction of a son by a domineering parent.

The Memorial

Isherwood's witty first foray into autobiographical fiction recalls the post-war dissolution of traditional English families.

Only now that Isherwood is dead can the pattern be seen clearly in a life that ranged restlessly from Oxbridge skeptic to Hindu disciple, from literary collaborator with W. H. Auden to Boswell of prewar Britain and postwar Hollywood. . . . His novels and nonfiction now all seem to be chapters of one enormous work in which he is the major character

The First World War is over. Eric Vernon is on the cusp of adulthood. Tall, bony and awkward he finds himself torn between a desire to emulate his heroic father, who led a life of quiet sacrifice, and resentment toward his father's roguish friend Edward Blake, who survived the war only to throw himself into gay life in Berlin. With subtle wit and trademark irony, Isherwood's second novel evokes a society in flux.

Diaries Volume Two 1960-1969

The Sixties

A great writer nails the sixties, from California to swinging London, in his fearless, insightful diaries - with a preface by Christopher Hitchens.

If the purpose of a published diary is to transport the reader into another person's life, then Isherwood's diaries succeed. They give you, fleetingly, the illusion of being him

His cultural highmindedness makes his lowdown stuff even more entertaining

Katherine Bucknell continues to prove an ideal editor. We are told all we need, and nothing we don't. nothing is repeated, and references to living persons feel both substantive and discreet. The Sixties counts as a model accomplishment of the professional and scrupulous handling of an important literary manuscript

These volumes will shed much light not just on Isherwood the writer but on the 1960s in America

Katherine Bucknell has done a tremendous job

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. He spent four years in Berlin writing Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based, and then in 1939 he moved to America. He became a US citizen in 1946, where he wrote another five novels including A Single Man, a travel book and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works: Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.

This second volume of Christopher Isherwood's remarkable diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally swinging free of post-war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New York, and the raw Australian outback. 
 
The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time - Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, W. Somerset Maugham and many others. They are most revealing about Isherwood himself - his fiction, his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. 
 
In the background run references to the political and historical events of the period such as the anxieties of the Cold War, the moon landing and the Vietnam war. In The Sixties Isherwood turns his fearless eye on the decade which more than any other has shaped the way we live now.

Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1

The first volume of Christopher Isherwood's intimate and insightful diaries.

A major literary event...an essential part of his oeuvre

There is not a page that does not contain a good joke, original insight, deadly accurate description or delicious nugget of gossip... A major literary work, the diaries round off the writer both as man and artist. They are intimate and intensely personal

There is plenty to enjoy in this first volume...Isherwood's is an exemplary twentieth-century life: assured and neurotic, fearless and fretful, generous and small-minded, forgiving and remorsefully judgemental

A pleasure to read... No word is wasted, and the casual-looking sentences create the impression that we are overhearing what is being said

Enthralling...Isherwood...struggles with his demons in spare, luminous and merciless prose

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. He spent four years in Berlin writing Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based, and then in 1939 moved to America. He became a US citizen in 1946, where he wrote another five novels including A Single Man, a travel book and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works: Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.

In 1939 Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden emigrated together to the United States. In spare, luminous prose these diaries describe Isherwood's search for a new life in California; his work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, his pacifism during World War II and his friendships with such gifted artists and intellectuals as Garbo, Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Charles Laughton, Gielgud, Olivier, Richard Burton and Aldous Huxley. 
 
Throughout this period, Isherwood continued to write novels and sustain his literary friendships - with E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams and others. He turned to his diaries several times a week to record jokes and gossip, observations about his adopted country, philosophy and mystical insights. His devotion to his diary was a way of accounting for himself; he used it as both a discipline and a release.

Mr Norris Changes Trains

Isherwood's immortal novel about political high-tension, passion and literary talent in 1930s Berlin

A supreme example of a radiant prose rhythm married to the most delicious dialogue – a portrait of the subtly ruinous Mr Norris.

Isherwood sketches with the lightest of touches the last gasp of the decaying demi-monde and the vigorous world of Communists and Nazis, grappling with each other on the edge of the abyss

What the Berlin stories retain, to a unique degree, is the ability to tell us what it really felt like then - to feel involved with the Germans and still to find that they retained their mystery; to be in the mode, yes, of a camera, and yet to be furiously, hopelessly involved

The first literary novel that really switched me on was Christopher Isherwood's Mr Norris Changes Trains

He immortalised Berlin in two short, brilliant novels both published in the Thirties, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye To Berlin, inventing a new form for future generations - intimate, stylised reportage in loosely connected episodes

Mr Norris Changes Trains brought him recognition as one of the most promising young writers of his generation

Christopher Isherwood was born at High lane, Cheshire, in 1904. He left Cambridge without graduationg, tried briefly to study medicine and in 1928 published All the Conspirators, followed by a second novel, The Memorial in 1932. From 1928 onwards he lived mostly out of England: four years in Berlin, five in various European countries including Portugal, Holland, Belgium and Denmark. In 1939 he went to California, which became his home for the rest of his life. His Berlin experiences produced two novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). 
 
Isherwood worked with the American Friends Service Committee during part of the war. In 1946 he became a US citizen. Following his move to America he wrote five novels - Prater Violet, The World in the Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man and A Meeting by the River; a travel book about South America, The Condor and the Cows; and Ramakrishna and his Disciples, a biography of the great Indian mystic. 
 
In 1971 he published Kathleen and Frank, a book based on the correspondence of his parents and his mother's diary, in 1977 Christopher and his Kind, an autobiographical account of the years 1929 to 1939, and in 1980 My Guru and His Disciple, the story of his friendship with the Swami Prabhavananda. He died in 1986.

After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

The Berlin Novels

Two acclaimed novels based on Isherwood's experiences in pre-war Berlin, together in one volume

Isherwood is one of the great mythmakers of his time. The Berlin Novels are masterpieces, funny, darkly innocent explorations of a world Berlin in the Thirties that is now as firmly in the past as Pompeii

Mr Norris Changes Trains is a masterpiece in comic portraiture

In Mr Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood sketches with the lightest of touches the last gasp of the decaying demi-monde and the vigorous world of Communists and Nazis, grappling with each other on the edge of the abyss

Reading Goodbye to Berlin is much like overhearing anecdotes in a crowded bar while history knocks impatiently at the windows.

Christopher Isherwood was born at High lane, Cheshire, in 1904. He left Cambridge without graduationg, tried briefly to study medicine and in 1928 published All the Conspirators, followed by a second novel, The Memorial in 1932. From 1928 onwards he lived mostly out of England: four years in Berlin, five in various European countries including Portugal, Holland, Belgium and Denmark. In 1939 he went to California, which became his home for the rest of his life. His Berlin experiences produced two novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). 
 
Isherwood worked with the American Friends Service Committee during part of the war. In 1946 he became a US citizen. Following his move to America he wrote five novels - Prater Violet, The World in the Evening, Down There on a Visit, A Single Man and A Meeting by the River; a travel book about South America, The Condor and the Cows; and Ramakrishna and his Disciples, a biography of the great Indian mystic. 
 
In 1971 he published Kathleen and Frank, a book based on the correspondence of his parents and his mother's diary, in 1977 Christopher and his Kind, an autobiographical account of the years 1929 to 1939, and in 1980 My Guru and His Disciple, the story of his friendship with the Swami Prabhavananda. He died in 1986.

Christopher Isherwood gives fascinating insight into pre-war Berlin. 
 
MR NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS 
The first of Christopher Isherwood's classic 'Berlin' novels, this portrays the encounter and growing friendship between young William Bradshaw and the urbane and mildly sinister Mr Norris. Piquant, witty and oblique, it vividly evokes the atmosphere of pre-war Berlin, and forcefully conveys an ironic political parable. 
 
GOODBYE TO BERLIN 
The inspiration for the film Cabaret and for the play I Am a Camera, this novel remains one of the most powerful of the century, a haunting evocation of the gathering storm of the Nazi terror. Told in a series of wry, detached and impressionistic vignettes, it is an unforgettable portrait of bohemian Berlin, a city and a world on the very brink of ruin.

A Memoir 1945 - 1951

Lost Years

'His writing soon becomes addictive as one self-disclosure follows another. What better recommendation for a diary could there be?' - The Times

Isherwood's account is endearingly honest... a journal not only unusually objective but in parts shockingly frank. You are left feeling you have truly got to know Christopher Isherwood... A welcome supplement to Isherwood's Diaries and provides futher insight into a major literary figure

In Lost Years Isherwood lays bare his mid-life crisis with critical self-candour, never losing his engaging manner nor his sense of humour... His diaries are the basis for all his creative work, and Lost Years is the most revealing so far

Isherwood remains a curious and memorable writer... A master of translucent prose, the events and people of these years seem to be described by a narrator as perceptive as he is unobtrusive

Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years writing for Hollywood, but by 1945 he had all but ceased to write fiction and even abandoned his habit of keeping a diary. Instead he embarked on a life of frantic socialising and drinking. Looking back from the 1970s, Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories to form a remarkably honest mixture of private and social history.

Christopher Isherwood

Sally Bowles is the dazzling centrepiece of Goodbye to Berlin, distilling Isherwood's genius into the tale of one baudy, brilliant woman. 
 
1930s Berlin is a realm of glamour and sleaze, repression and excess, threatened by a rising tide of tyranny. There, a lonely young Brit working on a novel is charmed by an English runaway and aspiring star, the delightfully decadent Sally Bowles. The intimate, fleeting connection they share will stay with him long after. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.

Christopher Isherwood

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Vintage Deco9 Books

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