This second volume of Christopher Isherwood’s remarkable, intimate diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday as the conservative fifties give way to the infamous decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of southern Californian to a London finally swinging free of postwar 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 he reveals in reckless detail the emotional drama of his love for the American painter Don Bachardy, who was thirty years his junior and struggling to establish his own artistic identity.

The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the time–Francis Bacon, Richard Burton, Leslie Caron, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, Hope Lange, Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Vanessa Redgrave, Tony Richardson, David Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many others. They are most revealing about Isherwood himself–his fiction (including A Single Man and Down There on a Visit), his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. He moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression, from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, from the opening of Cabaret on Broadway (which he skipped) to a close analysis of Gide.
In the background, run his continual references to the political and historical events of the period: the anxieties of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the moon landing. Isherwood has long been renowned for his near-prophetic portraits of a morally bankrupt Europe on the eve of World War II; in The Sixties, he turns his fearless eye on the decade which more than any other has shaped the way we live now.

“A rare treat…One of the great literary accounts of the twentieth century.” THE GUARDIAN  ”

An intimate portrait of the life of a beautiful if neurotic mind…streaked with gossip, flinty observations, great good humor, and–despite Isherwood’s fundamental discretion–plenty of frank talk.” THE NEW YORK TIMES  

“A mix of quotidian detail, social observation, moody reverie, gossip, and self-rebuke.” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL