The Sixties

<p>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. <br><br>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. <br><br>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 <i>The Sixties</i> Isherwood turns his fearless eye on the decade which more than any other has shaped the way we live now.</p>