The Sixties
  • Published: 1 May 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099565222
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 800
  • RRP: $59.99

The Sixties

Diaries Volume Two 1960-1969

Formats & editions
EBook
31 Oct 2012
Tr. Paperback
1 May 2012
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A great writer nails the sixties, from California to swinging London, in his fearless, insightful diaries - with a preface by Christopher Hitchens.

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.
  • Published: 1 May 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099565222
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 800
  • RRP: $59.99
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About the author

Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in Berlin and writing the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based. He moved to America in 1939, becoming a US citizen in 1946, and wrote another five novels, including Down There on a Visit and A Single Man, a travel book about South America and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the late 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works: Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind, My Guru and His Disciple and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.

portrait photo of Christopher Isherwood

Also by Christopher Isherwood

A Single Man
The Animals
My Guru and His Disciple
The Condor and the Cows
Kathleen and Frank
Lions and Shadows
Down There on a Visit
See all

Praise for The Sixties

If the purpose of a published diary is to transport the reader into another person's life, then Isherwood's diaries succeed. They give you, fleetingly, the illusion of being him

Sunday Times

His cultural highmindedness makes his lowdown stuff even more entertaining

Daily Mail

Katherine Bucknell continues to prove an ideal editor. We are told all we need, and nothing we don't. nothing is repeated, and references to living persons feel both substantive and discreet. The Sixties counts as a model accomplishment of the professional and scrupulous handling of an important literary manuscript

Literary Review

Katherine Bucknell has done a tremendous job

D J Taylor

My favourite book of the year

Financial Times, Christmas round up

These volumes will shed much light not just on Isherwood the writer but on the 1960s in America

Contemporary Review
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