Little less than a century old, Christopher Isherwood’s classic book still sheds light on the city that’s its star…

Aficionados of Slow Travel know that to get to the soul of a place you don’t necessarily have to explore its heart. Tourists gathering around London’s Trafalgar Square or Rome’s Trevi Fountain may feel that they have come face to face with a city’s history, but these are landmarks, nothing more, ignored by locals to whom they represent little.

The soul of a city isn’t found in the symbols constructed by its dignitaries but in its very fabric, and it’s this that has led Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories – actually two short novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye To Berlin – to become essential to all those who want to understand Germany’s capital a little better.

Eighty years on, despite the devastation wrought upon the city by World War Two and its subsequent division, Isherwood’s Berlin remains identifiable to those tramping its streets from tourist destination to tourist destination.

‘Berlin is a city with two centres,’ he writes, ‘the cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops round the Memorial Church, a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town; and the self-conscious civic centre of buildings round the Unter Den Linden, carefully arranged. In grand international styles, copies of copies, they assert our dignity as a capital city—a parliament, a couple of museums, a State bank, a cathedral, an opera, a dozen embassies, a t…