Garebian, Keith (2011). The Making of Cabaret. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-973250-0– via Google Books. Ma non dovreste allarmarvi tanto, sapete”. Provavo più che mai, in quel momento, un sentimento di protezione per lui. Questo sentimento, misto di protezione e di affetto, che in modo tanto facile e pericoloso egli ispirava in me, doveva poi influire su tutte le nostre relazioni future.

The narrator, William Bradshaw, lives there nicely as an expat giving English classes and enjoying life. This is pretty much all that we know about him, he doesn’t even explicitly reveal his sexual orientation. In fact, this first person narrative tells us very little about narrator and focuses entirely on the person of Mr Norris, a perfect English gentlemen, a charming scoundrel. And that Berlin was caught between the carefree hedonism of its cabarets (heirloom of the 1920s) and an economic and political crisis which quite helped the Nazis to kidnap Germany and throw it to the dogs.Isherwood sketches with the lightest of touches the last gasp of the decaying demi-monde and the vigorous world of Communists and Nazis, grappling with each other on the edge of the abyss. In 1945, Isherwood published Prater Violet, fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, The World in the Evening (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones. Fryer, Jonathan (1977). Isherwood: A Biography. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company. ISBN 0-385-12608-5– via Google Books. Far less successful is how the British author writes about Mr Norris' business between Paris and Berlin: plotting and intrigues are definitely something Graham Greene is more apt to work on than his compatriot. Isherwood tries to tell us more about German communists but he somehow fails to be very convincing in that respect. Grossman, Lev (6 January 2010). "All-Time 100 Novels: The Berlin Stories". Time. New York City . Retrieved 11 February 2022.

After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood – eBook Details Gerald Hamilton was a gun-runner for the IRA, a con-man caught in embezzlement plots, a Commie symp and then, turning far, far right, he was against war with Germany, espousing the views of fascist Oswald Mosley. Facing arrest in the UK, he tried to escape to Ireland dressed as a nun. Isherwood published this book in 1935 while the wayward Gerald Hamilton was spinning left and right. How could Isherwood resist using Hamilton as an amusing character? William Bradshaw, an English teacher in Berlin, has a chance encounter on a train with the slightly sinister Arthur Norris. On the surface Norris is a charming, if highly strung and down at heel, English gentleman. As the reader realises, and well before Bradshaw, Norris's charm masks a morally bankrupt personality. The character of Arthur Norris was based on a real life character, who Christopher Isherwood befriended in Berlin, called Gerald Hamilton.Isherwood wasn't known in the US until 1951 when John Van Druten took a couple of his Berlin stories and wrote the play "I Am a Camera," later a musicom. He told an interviewer, "I've never had a great success at first with anything I've written." He may have been the earliest to write about Berlin in the 30s, but the forgotten and slighted Robert McAlmon caught the nether-scene, steeped in drugs and unzippered frolics ten years earlier in "Miss Knight and Others," which, for years, was unpublished here. Mr Norris is a man who lives well, despite his soon obvious lifestyle of debts, despair and dodgy dealings. The novel is set in 1930’s Berlin and so it is impossible to ignore the political situation unfolding there. Mr Norris is keen to shine at the local Communist Party meetings, but these activities also lead to him being questioned by the authorities. Allen 2004: "The real Isherwood... [was] the least political of the so-called Auden group, [and] Isherwood was always guided by his personal motivations rather than by abstract ideas."