Goodbye to Berlin: Christopher Isherwood

Berlin, 1929: a young writer called Christopher Isherwood walks the streets pulsing with life.

His work captures a city and a society on the brink, illuminating the lives of outsiders, the rhythms of daily life and the fragile, often unseen spaces where identity, desire and conscience intersect.This intimate reading, by actor and singer Olly Alexander, brings one of the 20th century's most influential queer writers vividly to life at a moment of profound personal and political crisis.Using Isherwood's own diaries, letters, memoirs and fiction, the piece traces his journey from the sexual freedom of Weimar Berlin to exile under Nazism and to the creative breakthrough that produced 'The Berlin Stories'.Today, his reflections on displacement, social upheaval and the courage to live authentically feel strikingly relevant, offering a clearer view of the world and ourselves.