The second volume of Isaiah Berlin's revelatory letters, spanning the years 1946-1960.
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, in 1909.
When he was six, his family moved to Russia, and in Petrograd in
1917 Berlin witnessed both Revolutions - Social Democratic and
Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents emigrated to England, where
he was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi
College, Oxford. Apart from his war service in New York,
Washington, Moscow and Leningrad, he remained at Oxford thereafter
- as a Fellow of All Souls, then of New College, as Chichele
Professor of Social and Political Theory, and as founding President
of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British
Academy.
His published work includes Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts
and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The
Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of
Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the
Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind
and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the
history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli
Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong
defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.
Readers of Berlin's letters will find the same bubbling flow of
malice, wit and human insight on the written page
*The Economist*
A dazzling display of intellectual pyrotechnics
*New Statesman*
As well as being sometimes profoundly wise, these letters are often
laugh-out-loud funny
*Irish Times*
They delight in flashing the stiletto, these donnish types, and
impossible to conceive would be a college in which no academic
grown had a dagger sticking out of the back. It is precisely this
kind of malice which constitutes a naughty proportion of the book's
appeal
*Guardian*
Ironic, gossipy, witty, intermittently profound and always
intensely human
*Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year*
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