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A young upper-class Englishman slumming it in the poorer suburbs of Berlin hardly seems a promising start to understanding the last years of the Weimar Republic. An unattributed quote in a Wikipedia article on Christopher Isherwood suggests otherwise: " Goodbye to Berlin  is his portrait of a city in which Adolf Hitler was rising to power ― enabled by poverty, unemployment, increasing attacks on Jews and Communists, and ignored by the defiant hedonism of night life in the cafes, bars and brothels". In March 1929, Isherwood aged 25 years, joined his schoolfriend Wystan (WH) Auden for a ten day visit. He returned there in July and finally moved there in November. Isherwood remained resident in Berlin until May 1933, when he was forced to flee the new Nazi regime with his German boyfriend Heinz Neddermeyer. His relevant stories are based on raw material recorded in his diary while he was there:       Mr Norris Changes Trains , a novel published in 1935,     ...

  That year, 1931, for the first and last time in my life, I deliberately set out to write a book to please, one which with luck might be made into a film. So recalled the English author Graham Greene. The book, which he self-consciously titled "An Entertainment", was published in 1932 as Stamboul Train (in the UK) and Orient Express  (in the US). The overnight-train theme was apparently popular in the Interwar Years. Greene admits that "before I completed the book, Marlene Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express  (1932), the English had made Rome Express  (1932), and even the Russians had produced their railway film Turksib ". Agatha Christie's book Murder on the Orient Express  (UK) and Murder in the Calais Coach  (US) followed in 1934.   While both the books, Stamboul Train  and Murder on the Orient Express,  concern journeys on the express train service between Paris and Istanbul, they are very different in style. Greene's story is...

  During the interwar years from 1919 to 1939, Britain continued to rule over a vast global empire. Millions of non-Britons were seemingly compliant with the wishes of a relative handful of white administrators, traders and planters. That this preposterous bluff worked at all was a mystery that intrigued contemporary authors. Of writers like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, it is probably W Somerset Maugham who came closest to describing the colonial 'type', of intuiting the 'trick' of colonist confidence. His short fiction has become associated with the Federated Malay States (FMS) and British North Borneo (BNB) in particular. Through his stories collected in The Casuarina Tree  (1926) and Ah King  (1933), Maugham delivers an astute understanding of how a few Englishmen and their wives 'got away' with dominating many more Malays, Dayaks, Chinese and Tamils.  Maugham is reminded of the Casuarina trees he observed in the otherwise luxuriant jungle. They were ...