A stunningly intimate exploration of the writer and gay cultural icon and of his lifelong search for authenticity.The story of Christopher Isherwood’s life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of...

An engrossing new biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. From the editor of Isherwood’s diaries and letters.Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born to and set out to make a different one. Heir to an English estate, he flunked out of university, moved to Berlin, was driven through Europe by the Nazis, and circled the globe before finally settling in Hollywood. There he adopted a new religion and continued...

This remarkable debut novel is a vibrant tale of beauty and passion, stalked by desolation. Katherine Bucknell captures the tragedy of a marriage on the brink with extraordinary delicacy and insight and draws us into a compelling world glittering with wealth and social prestige.David is an investment banker; Elizabeth, his wife, is a woman of peerless beauty and refinement. They have two children; their marriage seems perfect. Why does she want him to retire and move home to Americ...

Leninsky Prospekt is an enthralling novel about conflicting allegiances, to family, friends, nations, ideals, at a time of legendary international tension.In October 1962, Nikita Krushchev and John Kennedy confronted each other over the deployment of Russian missiles in Cuba, and world came as close as it has ever been to nuclear holocaust. During the crisis, the New York City Ballet, led by the Russian-born choreographer, George Balanchine, was performing in Moscow. And the dissid...

An intimate portrait of London intellectual life, the breakdown of a marriage and the friendship between two women, ‘What You Will’ draws the reader into a spellbinding world of beauty and tension.Gwen, an American painter, lives in London with her English husband, Lawrence, an Oxford don. When Gwen’s friend Hilary arrives from New York bruised by a broken engagement, a lost job and an unsuitable love affair, Gwen is determined to find her someone to marry. But will he be another O...

The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait.Isherwood began his career depicting the ...

The Guarneri, a violin rarer than a Stradivarius, belonged to the charismatic Irish virtuoso Robert Flynn. Famed for his performances of the classical repertoire, including the early works of Ernest Grayson, Flynn wandered the countryside anonymously, playing in villages and collecting folk tunes before he died young during World War I.Ernest Grayson, arguably the greatest British composer of the twentieth century, suffered a crisis of imagination in 1908 and spent time in a sanato...

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 to the raw Australian outback. He charts his ongoing quest for spiritual certainty under the guidance of his Hindu guru, and he reveals in reckless d...

Candid and revealing, the final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries brings together his thoughts on life, love, and death. Beginning in the period of his life when he wrote Kathleen and Frank, his first intensely personal book, Liberation: Diaries 1970–1983 intimately and wittily records Isherwood's immersion in the 1970s art scene in Los Angeles, New York, and London—a world peopled by the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney, as ...

Masculinity, Senses, Spirit brings together current work by leading scholars in the fields of gender studies, religion, history, and cultural studies to examine the complex interrelationship between gender, sexuality, and the realms of the spirit and the senses in the Atlantic world from the eighteenthcentury to the present. Ranging in scope from the bridal mysticism of eighteenthcentury German Moravians, through the education theories of the German "Gymnasium," the creation of ...

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 unexpe...

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. He charts his ongoing quest for spiritual certainty under the guidance of his Hindu guru, and reveals in reckless detail ...