Isherwood and Queer Life 1945-1959: Katherine Bucknell and Peter Parker

'A first-rate biography of the man, the writer and the lover' DAVID HOCKNEY

An engrossing new biography of the man whose writings about 1930s Berlin made him famous. From the editor of Isherwood's diaries and letters.

Christopher Isherwood rejected the life he was born to and set out to make a different one. Heir to an English estate, he flunked out of university, moved to Berlin, was driven through Europe by the Nazis, and circled the globe before settling in Hollywood. There he adopted a new religion and continued to form the friendships through which he discovered himself. Using a wealth of unpublished material, Christopher Isherwood Inside Out tells how his traumas were healed by his life as a monk in the 1940s, enabling him to commit unflinchingly to a sexually open relationship in the 1950s, and to come out as a 'grand old man' of the gay rights movement in the 1970s.

The first part of a major new anthology which uncovers the rich reality of life for queer men in London

In the 1940s, it was believed that homosexuality had been becoming more widespread in the aftermath of war. A moral panic ensued, centred around London as the place to which gay men gravitated. In a major new anthology, Peter Parker explores what it was actually like for queer men in London in this period, whether they were well-known figures such as John Gielgud, 'Chips' Channon and E.M. Forster, or living lives of quiet - or occasionally rowdy - anonymity in pubs, clubs, more public places of assignation, or at home. It is rich with letters, diaries, psychological textbooks, novels, films, plays and police records, covering a wide range of viewpoints, from those who deplored homosexuality to those who campaigned for its decriminalisation. Some Men In London is a testament to queer life, which was always much more complex than newspapers, governments and the Metropolitan Police Force imagined.