Lions and shadows, an education in the twenties

Isherwood's evocative and sensitive account of childhood and youth in the 1920s. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FENTON Subtitled 'An education in the twenties', this work blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious public school boy to Cambridge drop-out at large in London's Bohemia. It contains thinly veiled portraits of Isherwood's contemporaries Auden, Upward, and Spender, whose intimate friendships and cult of rebellion shaped the literary identity of England in the 1930s. Witty and outrageous, Isherwood pokes fun at the stars of his generation, above all himself, even as he testifies to their unique early gifts.