Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

<p><b>'A first-rate biography of the man, the writer and the lover' DAVID HOCKNEY</b><br><b>'Bucknell's research is impressive and her judgements astute' <i>GUARDIAN</i></b><br><br><b>An engrossing new biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. </b><b>From the editor of Isherwood’s diaries and letters.</b><br><br>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 settling in Hollywood.<br><br>There he adopted a new religion and continued to form the friendships – including an astounding number of romantic and sexual ones – through which he discovered himself.<br><br>Using a wealth of unpublished material, <i>Christopher Isherwood Inside Out</i> tells how the traumas of his father’s death in World War I and his failure to protect his German lover from the Nazis were healed by his life as a monk in the 1940s, enabling him to commit unflinchingly to a sexually open relationship in the 1950s, and to come out as a ‘grand old man’ of the gay rights movement in the 1970s.<br><br><b>With this new biography, enriched by unlimited access to Isherwood’s partner Don Bachardy, Katherine Bucknell shows how Christopher Isherwood achieved a uniquely inspiring personal life. He effected lasting change in our culture, through both his literary works and the way he lived.<br><br>‘The best biography I’ve ever read . . . Every page is full of surprises’ EDMUND WHITE<br><br>'It’s hard to imagine a better qualified candidate for this task than Katherine Bucknell' <i>THE TIMES</i><br><br>'A fast-paced story of an extraordinary life and a broadly illuminating history of vast cultural changes’ EDWARD MENDELSON</b></p>