The Sixties

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. 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. 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 The Sixties Isherwood turns his fearless eye on the decade which more than any other has shaped the way we live now.