Isaiah Berlin: A Life - Softcover

Ignatieff, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099577313 ISBN 13: 9780099577317

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

Isaiah Berlin refused to write an autobiography, but he agreed to talk about himself - and so for ten years, he allowed Michael Ignatieff to interview him. Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was one of the greatest and most humane of modern philosophers; historian of the Russian intellgentisia biographer of Marx, pioneering scholar of the Romantic movement and defender of the liberal idea of freedom. His own life was caught up in the most powerful currents of the century. The son of a Riga timber merchant, he witnessed the Russian Revolution, was plunged into suburban school life and the ferment of 1930s Oxford; he became part of the British intellectual establishment During the war, he as at the heart of Anglo-American diplomacy in Washington; afterwards in Moscow he saw the grim despair of Stalinism. The book is full of memorable meetings - with Virginia Woolf and Sigmund Freud, with Churchill, with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. Yet Ignatieff is not afraid to delve into Berlin's conflicts: his jewish idealism, his deep aspirations. This is a work of great subtelty and penetration, exhilarating and intimate, powerful and profound.

About this title

Product Description

Paperback. Pub Date: 2000 Pages: 356 Publisher: Vintage UK Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in Riga in the twilight of the Czarist empire. He the lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. Biographer of Marx. scholar of the Romantic movement. and defer of the liberal idea of ??freedom against Soviet tyranny. Berlin was the presiding judge of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. When he died in 1997. he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time. But Berlin's life was not only a life of the mind. From Albert Einstein to Virginia Woolf. Winston Churchill to Anna Akhmatova. his circle of friends constitutes a veritable who's who of twentieth-century art. politics. and philosophy. In this definitive work. the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject. Michael Ignatieff charts the emergence ...

Review

Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading liberal thinkers of the 20th century, and one of its fastest talkers. Born in the Latvian port of Riga in 1909, his family survived the Russian Revolution, but its chilly aftermath forced his Anglophile father to resettle them in Surbiton in 1921. Isaiah assimilated quickly, becoming in his mind equal parts Russian, English and Jewish, and subsequently he became the first Jew to be elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was to spend most of his life studying and lecturing at Oxford, developing his concept of "negative liberty"; but although he longed to know one big thing, to be a "hedgehog" in his own famous definition, instead he felt more naturally a "fox", knowing many smaller things. This Reynard instinct, however, made him wonderful company, and he became that rarity: a British public intellectual, who made learning attractive. Michael Ignatieff has written a book that stands somewhere between a biography and a ghost-written autobiography, relying mostly on Berlin's own recollections gathered from conversations between them over a 10-year period. Berlin had his detractors, including himself ("superficial"), and a more critical evaluation of his contribution to philosophy will be written, but Ignatieff captures the human side of this wise and cosmopolitan man, whose deceptive "lightness of being" concealed a soul that stared at the horrors of his century. --David Vincent

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0099577313
• ISBN 13: 9780099577317
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384