The Sixties : Diaries, Volume Two: 1960-1969

C. Isherwood, K. Bucknell, C. Hitchens

This second volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday, as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. These pages 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, Vanessa Redgrave, David O. Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many others - yet prove most revealing about the author himself. Isherwood moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression, from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, while referencing the political and historical events of the period: the anxieties of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarins spaceflight, the eruption of violence in Americas inner cities, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, and the Summer of Love. In his chronicle, The Sixties, Christopher Isherwood turns his observant, unerring eye on the decade that, more than any other, has shaped the way we live now.