DIARIES (Complete in Three Volumes). Vol. I: 1939-1960; Vol. II: 'The Sixties', 1960-1969 (Preface by Christopher Hitchens); Vol. III: 'Liberation', 1970-1983 (Preface by Edmund White).

First edition, first printings. Original blue, orange, and red cloth respectively, in dustwrappers. A very near fine set, the bindings square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Minor pushing to spine tips; light toning to the pages of the first volume. The dustwrappers show very minor edgewear, a little crumpling to spine tips, and some light surface marking (near-unavoidable with the matte finish of the wrappers). All volumes are unclipped and correctly priced (£25, £30, £30 respectively) to front flaps. An attractive uniform set of first editions.

These three hefty volumes (weighing in at 1048, 756, and 875 pages respectively) are not just a richly entertaining addition to Isherwood's published prose, but can be read, retrospectively, as integral to his writing methods. A pioneer of forms of auto-fiction now more familiar in the work of contemporary writers like Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, Isherwood freely quarried his diaries not only for his many volumes of autobiography, but also for the novels. As Peter Parker wrote in his Times review of Volume Two, the diaries "complete a multi-volume autobiographical project describing his relationships with the most important people in his life".