This remarkable 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 Gagarin's spaceflight, the eruption of violence in America's inner cities, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, and the Summer of Love. In his unparalleled 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.

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. He spent four years in Berlin writing Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based, and then in 1939 he moved to America. He became a US citizen in 1946, where he wrote another five novels including A Single Man, a travel book and a biography of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna. In the 1960s and '70s he turned to autobiographical works- Kathleen and Frank, Christopher and His Kind and October, one month of his diary with drawings by Don Bachardy.