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“... of Frances Partridge than, say, Jimi Hendrix. We hear of lunches at Chez Victor, where Spender and Isherwood giggle at jokes ‘all about Stephen’s boyfriends in Berlin’. And with every story young David rises in his own steely estimation. Stephen asked me to lunch with him at his club, the Garrick. I had never before been in a gentleman’s club. He told ...”

“... camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. ‘After all,’ said Isherwood, ‘Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals.’ The young man was not impressed. ‘But Hitler killed ...”

“... a fairly representative specimen (May 1957 – an uncosmopolitan month for the Stravinskys): 11. Isherwood and Don come for dinner. 15. Dinner with Gerald [Heard]. 16. Lunch with Christopher Isherwood and Don at MGM Studios. 17. Bob [Craft] records Gesualdo 2 to 5. 19. Aaron Copland for dinner. 22. Bob ...”

“... pattern: the urbane self-possession of Somerset Maugham, the seeming simplicity and eagerness of Christopher Isherwood, Denton Welch’s brio, and so on. The ghosts of such treatments are visible, enhancing the individuality of the one which Francis Wyndham uses to relate Ursula’s destiny and the unusual events in her life. The idea of such a ...”

“... I should like to have done’. They included Rosamund Lehmann, William Plomer, John Hampson and Christopher Isherwood, whose second novel, The Memorial, he especially, and justly, admired. Isherwood and Plomer were friends and Lehmann an acquaintance, but such coincidences sometimes occur without damage to ...”

“... his years. Memoirists of his schooldays speak of him as having been almost spookily unboyish. Even Christopher Isherwood, who later on would enjoy noting his friend’s ‘stumpy, immature fingers’ and ‘babyishly shapeless’ ankles, found it hard to view him with full-hearted condescension: ‘I remember him chiefly for ... his smirking, tantalising ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... America’), W.H. Auden (‘Theological America’), Aldous Huxley (Psychedelic America’), and Christopher Isherwood (‘Mystical America’). As the chapter titles suggest, each of these writers is supposed to see America as if it were shaped by a literary genre or in conformity to some cluster of images. America for the Trollopes and Dickens ...”

“... in the context of his avowed admiration of Cézanne, to be a betrayal not an advance. In 1952 Christopher Isherwood gave E. M. Forster two bottles of claret and a painting by Vaughan. His work made an ideal gay to gay present; the male nude, or nude in landscape were his main, almost his only subjects, and the steady sale of his smaller works seems ...”

“... reviewed the emancipating influence of a good smoke on the writing capacities of Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell and Compton Mackenzie, he poses the large question whether ‘with abstainers multiplying, we may soon have to ask whether literature is going to become impossible – or has already begun to be impossible.’ It’s ...”

“... invalid chair. Auden briefly and reluctantly tutored their son, and his nocturnal hospitality to Christopher Isherwood was announced with distaste by the family butler. Her long liaison with the darkly romantic Alexander Kerensky, which began in cloak-and-dagger circumstances in New York, was only one of many points at which her lifeline touched major ...”

“... distinguishes between the cruel comedy of the former and the innocent humour of the latter, Christopher Hitchens quotes the unbeatable opening sentence of Waugh’s short story ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’: ‘“You will not find your father greatly changed,” remarked Lady Moping as the car turned into the gates of the County Asylum.’ This is ...”

“... with the revolutionary teachings of the American psychologist Homer Lane. Auden invited his friend Isherwood to join him in Berlin. Thirty-five years later, in his autobiography Christopher and his Kind, Isherwood wrote: ‘To Christopher, Berlin meant ...”

“... Ian – chastised him ‘by banging a serving spoon on his offensively prominent ear trumpet’. Christopher Isherwood, on the other hand, found that Maugham’s stammer ‘somehow made you feel that you were stammering, not he’. Raymond Mortimer noted his ‘very violent temper’. In his later years, visitors described him as ‘saurian’ or ...”

“... as a sub-text in some of the most significant writings of his generation. For authors like Auden, Isherwood and Spender, the struggle for sexual freedom was a stimulus to political dissent. Around 1930, the centre of gravity both of their lives and of their writings was displaced to Weimar Germany, where a Reichstag committee on the penal code had resolved to ...”