There must be plenty of people who, like myself, read their Isherwood during the war period and recognised in him a novelist not only admirable but congenial. Although quite capable of powerfully haunting effects (witness the closing scene of 'The Nowaks'), he offered clarity, common sense, easy-going humour and detachment as distinct from the more insistently literary or prophetic qualities of some of his elders. They constructed; he evidently re-created. There may have been something suspect about that detachment of his, something that ceased at times to look like an authorial strategy and became a mere personal reticence; but the rest was genuine, the gift for atmosphere and for location in place and time, the ability to fix a bar or a tenement or a beach or a Berlin street by the swift unfussy selection of concrete objects. The study of this was worth giving one's days and...