Living in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis, Christopher Isherwood wrote the stories that first brought him fame and later became the basis for the musical Cabaret. This was the period that Isherwood mined for his ground-breaking memoir, Christopher and His Kind (1976).

Less well known is the life the writer lived in California from 1939 until his death in 1986, or the subject which preoccupied much of his work there: religion. Isherwood became a devotee of Vedanta, a religious practice based on the study of ancient Indian scriptures, intended to inspire a sense of universal oneness. Isherwood lived for a period at the Ramakrishna Order’s Hollywood centre and for almost forty years was a student of the guru Swami Prabhavananda. He published translations, explanatory guides, an official biography of Sri Ramakrishna, and his own spiritual autobiography.