Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

“Bucknell’s considerable sourcework — so much writing from all fronts, so many interviews from the golden age of newspapers, magazines, Cavett — is more than synthesis; it is photosynthesis. Her big blue book breathes and glistens. Her subject, who regularly meditated as a convert with Aldous Huxley to the Hindu philosophy Vedanta, is reincarnated. Stone by stone, she’s built up a gritty, gorgeous monument to a curiously indelible 20th-century figure.”

– Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times

“It’s hard to imagine a better qualified candidate for this task than Katherine Bucknell, who has spent many years carefully untangling fact from fiction as the editor of Isherwood’s diaries and letters. While she notes Isherwood’s famous charm — the schoolboy grin, floppy fringe and ice-blue eyes that crinkled invitingly when he turned them on you — she is plainly keen not to be seduced. Instead, she lays out the facts in meticulous detail. Bucknell is non-judgmental, and because she has all the facts at her fingertips, she is good at noticing hidden patterns in Isherwood’s life.”

– Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Times

“Bucknell knows Isherwood like no one else – indeed, as her title has it, inside out. Here he is, in all his grippingly messed up splendour… Her account is utterly moving, right to the end, where she describes Isherwood on his deathbed ‘occasionally calling for Nanny’.”

– Valentine Cunningham, Literary Review

“A major new biography of the literary great. Bucknell has spent the greater part of 30 years immersed in Isherwood’s mind, sorting through his work, his papers, his letters.”

– Casey Schwartz, The Washington Post

“This absorbing biography burrows deeply into each stage of Isherwood’s continuous intellectual and spiritual evolutions. Bucknell closely examines his bourgeois English childhood, marked by family tragedies, and his famous lifelong friendships with poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender and their interwoven influences on each other’s work as well as Isherwood’s successive literary triumphs. Bucknell’s marvelously
knowledgeable portrait reveals the full dimensions of his richly contemplative life.”

– Raúl Niño, Booklist

“Bucknell brings scholarly acumen and bravura storytelling to her stunning biography of novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood. Her background as a novelist shows in her elegant lyricism. The sharp analysis sheds light on how Isherwood’s life influenced his work. This is a monumental achievement.”

– Publishers Weekly

“It was Nabokov’s notion that the only biography of a writer that matters is the biography of their style, and Bucknell is better on this, in relation to Isherwood, than anybody ever has been—the editing of his diaries and letters has made her an authority.  With this biography, we end up with an electrifying portrait of an entire period in British letters, yet the focus is where it should be, on the question of what made Isherwood the stylist he was.”

– Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books

“Two features in particular mark the biography as new: the close attention it pays to the influence of Isherwood’s childhood and family background on his life and work; and the equally close attention it pays to the life Isherwood made for himself in California. The book is meticulously documented, drawing on material unavailable to previous biographers. As a critic or interpreter, Bucknell is clever, sometimes daring, and mostly convincing.“

– Zachary Leader, The TLS

“A penetrating exploration of the life and work of the acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and pioneering figure in gay culture. While Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) may be best known for Goodbye to Berlin, which drew on his experiences in Weimar-era Berlin and inspired the musical Cabaret, this new biography by Bucknell, director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, astutely highlights the considerable merits of his other novels and candid autobiographical works. The author renders a sweeping portrait of Isherwood’s remarkable life journey, during which he forged indelible connections with many of the era’s preeminent literary and artistic figures.”

– Starred Review Kirkus

“Bucknell goes beyond the diaries, gathering up the many strands of the writer’s personal and public lives to create a nuanced, masterful portrait of a brilliant, insecure, charismatic seeker of artistic truth and personal freedom. Bucknell’s book homes in on the conflict between Isherwood’s thirst for public recognition and social climbing and the cultivation of his inner life… As Bucknell’s definitive wide-screen biography shows us, Isherwood’s struggles were transmuted into lyrical fiction that never stopped questioning what it meant to be a man in the 20th century, and thus his art became our gift.”

– Marc Weingarten, The Boston Globe

“Immensely thorough to a depth never reached before… A triumph of sympathetic understanding. [Bucknell] has carved her subject a place in the pantheon, and the benefits of her work, to general readers, as well as to scholars, will last a very long time.”

– Andrew Motion, New Statesman

“Katherine Bucknell’s remarkable Christopher Isherwood Inside Out displays an unmatched familiarity with the enormous range of Isherwood’s writings, published and unpublished, while simultaneously offering a striking portrait of an extremely complicated, self-contesting and not always winning personality. His work is such a strange and compelling mixture of self-exposure and self-invention, and Bucknell gets that brilliantly, tracing his unlikely path from English squire-in-the-making to Californian Vedantist with exemplary sympathy and wit.”

– Seamus Perry, TLS Books of the Year

Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2024 

– Frances Wilson, The Daily Telegraph

“Isherwood, the diarist and fiction writer whose work inspired Cabaret, lived one of the 20th centuries great literary lives.  He pushed to make homosexuality a mainstream subject and a pursuit seen as beautiful, like any love.  Bucknell sensed that no other biography (and there have been several) had quite managed to illuminate Isherwood’s “inner life.”

– The Washington Post 50 notable works of nonfiction from 2024

“A masterly biography of the author of Goodbye to Berlin and A Single Man, this book captures the intricacies of a fascinating, often contradictory character. Isherwood was an upper-class Englishman (he gained American citizenship in his forties) who genuinely loved people from all walks of life; a libertine turned Vedanta monk; a gay literary icon who didn’t come out publicly until his sixties. But, above all, as Bucknell shows, he was a tireless observer and recorder of people, places, and historical moments… Isherwood, she writes, “imagined a world in which he might be able to live differently”; through his work, he helped usher that world into being.”

– The New Yorker, The Best Books of 2024

“Katherine Bucknell, who has edited four huge volumes of Isherwood’s diaries and a collection of his letters, knows the man as no other scholar ever will. Bucknell is indefatigable, leading us expertly through every detail of his early years in England, his time in Weimar Germany, his travels everywhere from China to Western Samoa. Beneath the carnival of his social life, she never loses sight of the fact that even his spiky friend Gore Vidal named Isherwood “the best prose writer in English.”

– Pico Iyer, Air Mail 10 Best Books of 2024, #2