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Christopher Isherwood kept diaries almost all his life. The first extant one dates from 1917, when he was 12, and like most schoolboys he used it more to measure than record his days: ‘Work in morning, walk in afternoon. In choir. More work. Nothing special.’ At Cambridge, however, inspired by the W.N.P. Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man, he began keeping a more detailed and reflective record of his experiences. Fragmentary diaries survive from the years 1928 to 1938, but the four volumes of Isherwood’s published diaries begin with his arrival in America in January 1939 and end in 1983, three years before his death. One volume, ‘reconstructed’ by Isherwood from pocket diaries, because he failed to keep a proper journal between 1945 and 1951, was published as Lost Years: A Memoir.

The decision to publish these diaries in full was taken by his partner of 33 years, Don Bachardy, who began reading them the day Isherwood died and ‘wanted to share the experience I’d had with others’.