What Isherwood Saw Coming

As new editions of Christopher Isherwood’s work return to print — alongside the paperback release of Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out — Libreria welcomes Katherine Bucknell for an evening shaped by unsettling historical echoes.

In the early 1930s, Isherwood was writing from Berlin as democracy thinned, institutions faltered, and fascism moved from background noise to daily reality. He understood — earlier than most — how political collapse registers first in private lives: in fear, desire, complicity, pleasure, and denial. His work captured what it feels like to live as a system unravels.

In a moment marked by resurgent authoritarianism and a dawning post-NATO, post-UN world, Bucknell, who is also the editor of Isherwood’s diaries and letters, reflects on what his writing still shows us now: how quickly norms erode, how seductive danger can be, and how moral clarity is tested in everyday choices.

A conversation about biography, witness, and why Isherwood’s Berlin remains uncomfortably close to our present.

Katherine Bucknell edited all four volumes of Christopher Isherwood's Diaries (published by Chatto), a volume of letters between Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy (The Animals), and W.H. Auden's Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. Co-editor of Auden Studies, a founder of The W. H. Auden Society, and director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, she is widely recognised as a leading authority on Isherwood. She is also the author of five novels. She was born in Vietnam, raised in America, and lives in London.