SOURCE: Davenport, Basil. “Atmosphere of Decay.” Saturday Review XIX, no. 25 (15 April 1939): 14.

In the following review of Goodbye to Berlin, Davenport contends that “Mr. Isherwood combines an uncanny accuracy of observation and ability to convey his impressions with a universal sympathy almost unknown in English literature.”

The first section of this book is called “A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)”; the last is “A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-3).” Between lie four narrative pieces, tranches de vie with hardly enough plot for the name “short story,” but with too much depth to be called sketches, although that is the word Mr. Isherwood himself uses for them in his brief and modest preface, in which he tells us that the pieces in this book, as well as his previous novel, The Last of Mr Norris, were originally planned as part of a huge episodic novel of pre-Hitler Berlin. That was to have been...