A witty, appealing, and often outrageous portrait of some of the twentieth century's most influential and creative minds. Subtitled "An Education in the Twenties," Lions and Shadows blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious schoolboy to Cambridge dropout-at-large in London's bohemia. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Christopher Isherwood's contemporaries W. H. Auden, Edward Upward, and...

In this novel by the author of The Berlin Stories, a listless pair of siblings in post-WWI London battle the constraints of society and their mother. It's the 1920s-the wake of the Great War-and Britain is undergoing a transformation. The middle class is struggling, and the younger generation, feeling constrained by the values that once fueled the empire, is yearning to break free . . . A new war is brewing in the slums of Kensington, London....

It is the story of Christopher Isherwood's parents, the winsome and lively daughter of a successful wine merchant and the reticent, artistically gifted soldier-son of a country squire. They met in 1895 outside a music rehearsal in an army camp and married in 1903 after Christopher's father returned from the Boer War. Frank was killed in an assault near Ypres in 1915; Kathleen remained a widow for the rest of her life. Their story is told through letters...

A musical drama about an American girl who dreams of becoming a star while working as a singer in a third-rate cabaret in Germany on the eve of Hitler's rise to power.

A bemused would-be poet gets himself entangled with an unctuous cemetery entrepreneur, a mom-obsessed mortician. Also includes a featurette: Trying to Offend Everyone.