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“... make art out of self-effacement. This at least is one of the suggestions of the first volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, a whingeing, inward-bound mammoth of a book, where the author laboriously chronicles and inspects his every moment for changes in the moral and spiritual weather. Well, it can’t be his every moment, but it feels like it. Here ...”

“... and his main academic interest is something he calls ‘literary vitalism’: ‘Frank Norris, Dreiser, Kate Chopin, James Branch Cabell’. As he sees it, these writers traffic in ‘the purifying effect of struggle’, all ‘Eros and Thanatos’ and ‘solitary acts of personal liberation’. Teaching Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of ...”

“... man’ in the fall of 1999. And like the doomed protagonist, George, in the novel A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, I too was gay; I too was an English professor (on a one-term sabbatical back then); I too was middle-aged (at 39 years old then, whereas George is 58); I too was living in Los Angeles (although my teaching position is in Iowa City); I too ...”

“... his book. And yet Upward, when he started out, was highly regarded as a joker. In Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, he appears as ‘Allen Chalmers’, the brilliantly mischievous co-inventor of Mortmere, ‘a sort of anarchist paradise in which all accepted moral and social values are turned upside down’. Isherwood and Upward ...”

“... The past is there to be made use of, and everyone makes use of it in his own way. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson invent alternative Englands where radical social experiments were nipped in the bud by the entrenched forces of reaction, while T.S. Eliot’s successors imagine devout cavaliers preserving a unified sensibility in economic and spiritual matters ...”

“... in D’Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox’. In Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), the homosexual Baron Kuno von Pregnitz, pursued by the police on charges of political corruption, locks himself in panic into a cubicle in a public lavatory. Next ...”

“... Virginia Woolf wants to pull down the factory, to operate face to face in the open air. Christopher Isherwood, in some ways her most affectionate and enthusiastic disciple, went through the motions of restating her formula at the outset of some of his own fictions. He is the passive recording camera. Of course nothing could be less true of the ...”

“... Spasm and Whims promoted a Wildean cult of decadence, and were mocked by the naturalist Frank Norris in his novel The Octopus as ‘little toy magazines’. Symbolist-inspired bibelots appeared in Berlin, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Alexandria and elsewhere. Around the same time, the market for publications was exploding. It’s estimated that ...”