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Letters 1975-1997

Affirming

The fourth and final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s much admired letters

One of the great thinkers of the age. Anyone seeking to understand the 20th century should acquire this volume, and its three predecessors. They will be both stimulated and enlightened

This fourth and final volume of Berlin's letters, admirably edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, brings vividly back to life one of the most wise, witty and generous of men

The great magus of 20th-century liberalism

Berlin, at his best, reminding us that he was one of the great liberal thinkers of the postwar period

Modest, polite and beautifully written, these letters can be viewed as open-ended conversations with kindred spirits. They are also an important attempt to document the history of the late 20th century.

Affirming: Letters 1975–1997, edited, superbly, by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, is a joy only slightly dulled by the knowledge that it is the final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s wise, witty and never less than entertaining correspondence.

Isaiah Berlin’s Affirming: Letters 1975-1997 ... contains some wonderful letters and a huge dollop of Berlin’s capacious mind as well as his fondness for gossip.

Starbursts of thought [...] texts full of gaiety, passion and temperance, which insistently resist the rampaging squaddies of mindless populism

A triumphant conclusion [to] one of the most remarkable literary projects of our time ... amusing, compelling and illuminating ... Berlin’s Letters stand as a monument to European, Jewish, liberal civilisation in what may prove to be the last century of its recognisable flourishing

One of the greatest pleasures of last year was polishing off the fourth and last volume of Isaiah Berlin's letters … He consistently advanced two beliefs which should be born in mind in these troubled times. The first was an abhorrence of all-explaining systems of belief [...] the second is that good and desirable ends - freedom and equality, justice and security - are all too often incompatible, as a result of which compromises must be made ... He was a wise old bird and, if his letters are anything to go by, very lovable as well.

[Affirming] brings together the vividly written, wide-ranging and penetrating correspondence of one of the great liberal humanist minds of the 20th century

One way of reading this richly absorbing collection is as a running commentary on the closing decades of the 20th century by one of its most civilised and penetrating minds. The most unexpected letters, though, are some long and detailed defences of his own ideas

The fourth in the grand series of Isaiah Berlin’s correspondence [...] keeps up the flow of high cultural commentary and gossip

Affirming is an excellent source for the understanding of Berlin's thought in various contexts. But the letters also show Berlin's capacity for friendship, his sympathetic understanding of characters and viewpoints... At the risk of solecism, Icn bin ein Berliner

Isaiah Berlin is considered one of the letter-writers of the 20th century... those who give into temptation to flick through will be infinitely rewarded

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. 
 
Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin's Literary Trustees. he has (co-)edited many other books by Berlin -- including this volume's three predecessors, Flourishing, Enlightening and Building -- and other authors, and is also the editor of The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (2009). 
 
Mark Pottle is also a Fellow of Wolfson. He has (co-)edited the diaries and letters of Violet Bonham Carter, has collaborated in publishing a number of original First World War documents, and was Research Associate, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2000-2. He co-edited the preceding volume of these letters, Building.

‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, New York Review of Books 
 
The title of this final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, Building: Letters 1960–75, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with a series of essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance. 
 
Berlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind. 
 
Affirming is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004.

Letters 1960-1975

Building

The third volume of Isaiah Berlin’s remarkable letters takes us from 1960 to 1975

IB was one of the great affirmers of our time, a man to be admired not only for his intellectual achievements but for his loyalty, his humor, his modesty, his delight in the world and the people in it. Building is a wonderful edifice in his honor, meticulously, indeed lovingly, edited and annotated

Berlin was sui generis. There never was anyone like him before, and there probably will not be anyone like him again... He was, above all, a genuine -- as opposed to a stage -- liberal, who believed people were entitled to their beliefs and even to their prejudices, and both could be accommodated

Consistently interesting and at times strikingly unexpected, these letters show sides of Berlin that have not been seen before

Berlin's achievement was immense, in making ideas entertaining in a culture generally averse to them... One way to read [him] today is to relish the passionate man between the high-flown lines

There are many wonderful sketches. Of, for example, President Kennedy... or Roy Jenkins... and there are damning judgments of many great and good... Dip in and savour a lost world.... For reasons of technology (email and text) and also of intellectual culture the letters of today's Berlins... will simply not exist for future historians

Many of us who care about ideas feel a nostalgia for a time when thinkers were taken seriously and when irony was the spice of intellectual life rather than its meat. few exemplify this mythical age better than the 20th-century historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin... These letters often capture his insights with greater concision and sharpness than the originals... there is more here to enlighten and entertain than in the collected works of most of his contemporaries. In their introduction, the editors say: "If this is not one of the best letter-writers of the 20th century, we are ready to eat our respective hats." Gentlemen, you can leave your hats on.

Even more engrossing and entertaining than the previous volumes of Berlin’s correspondence. Pure joy

[It] finds the philosopher deeply embroiled in the great world, one day dining with JFK and the next engaged in trying not to laugh at Igor Stravinsky. A marvellous book, fascinating, irreverent and funny

Readers will be enriched, informed, amused – and grateful that Berlin never mastered concision

The letters are compelling. There is wit, charm and effortless erudition

In Building, a new and weighty volume of letters written between 1960 and 1975, all of Berlin’s characteristic gifts are on display… Serious and sceptical, wry and self-aware even when pessimistic, he is revealed once again as a captivating presence

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.

In the period covered here (1960–75) Isaiah Berlin creates Wolfson College, Oxford; John F. Kennedy becomes US President (and is assassinated); Berlin dines with JFK on the day he is told of the Soviet missile bases in Cuba; the Six-Day Arab–Israeli war of 1967 creates problems that are still with us today; Richard M. Nixon succeeds Johnson as US President and resigns over Watergate; and the long agony of the Vietnam War grinds on in the background. 
 
At the same time Berlin publishes some of his most important work, including Four Essays on Liberty – the key texts of his liberal pluralism – and the essays later included in Vico and Herder. He talks on the radio, appears on television and in documentary films and gives numerous lectures, especially his celebrated Mellon Lectures, later published as The Roots of Romanticism. 
 
Behind these public events is a constant stream of gossip and commentary, acerbic humour and warm personal feeling. Berlin writes about an enormous range of topics to a sometimes dazzling cast of correspondents. This new volume leaves no doubt that Berlin is one of the very best letter-writers of the twentieth century.

Vico, Hamann, Herder

Three Critics of the Enlightenment

A new, fully revised edition of two classic works by Isaiah Berlin - Vico and Herder and The Magus of the North. Features a new foreword by Jonathan Israel.

It will be a long time before students of either Vico or Herder are able to exhaust their gratitude to Berlin

The Magus of the North is a delightful surprise... Berlin at his very best. The prose flows powerfully, at times torrentially, richly saturated in information and ideas

Brilliant, impressionistic portraits of notable intellectual personalities, great fountains of adjectives and comparisons which bring the totality of their minds to life

This book brings together three major studies from Isaiah Berlin's central intellectual project – to explain the opposition to the excessively scientistic French Enlightenment by getting under the skin of its critics and giving a sympathetic account of their views. 
 
The contributions of these particular critics could hardly be more important. Giambattista Vico estabished that the humanties are and must remain crucially different from the sciences: J G Herder – sometimes called the father of European nationalism – originated populism, expressionism and pluralism (an idea which Berlin enriched and made powerfully his own); and the anti-rationalist J.G. Hamann lit the fuse of romanticism, the major movement to arise out of the various currents of hostility to Enlightenment thought. 
 
The intellectual tension that existed between Enlightenment advocates and these critics is as crucial today as it was at its inception. With his customary humane understanding, Berlin analyses the ideas of three deeply original but often neglected thinkers, and demonstrates their disturbing relevance to the central issues of today's world. 
 
This new edition includes three previously uncollected pieces on Vico, an interesting passage excluded from the first edition of the essay on Hamann, and Berlin's thoughtful letters responding to two reviewers of that same edition.

An Anthology of Essays

The Proper Study Of Mankind

An anthology of Isaiah Berlin's best and most representative work, drawn from a lifetime's writing by this most distinguished philosopher and historian of ideas.

He speaks with such infectious energy that he sweeps us up and carries us with him into territory that had seemed inaccessible. He becomes everyman's guide to everything exciting in the history of ideas

A restatement of liberalism in a form by which the world could live

His uniqueness can be very well sampled in this admirable selection... Large as it is, it can serve only to stimulate the appetite

The pleasure in reading Berlin lies in the clarity of the argument, in the laying out of his monumental sentences and paragraphs each of which is complete in itself while part of the greater and seemingly irrefutable whole which is gradually and massively revealed

‘He becomes everyman’s guide to everything exciting in the history of ideas’ New York Review of Books 
 
Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, and one of the finest writers. The Proper Study Of Mankind selects some of his best essays in which his insights both illuminate the past and offer a key to the burning issues of today. 
 
The full (and enormous) range of his work is represented here, from the exposition of his most distinctive doctrine - pluralism - to studies of Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Churchill and Roosevelt. In these pages he encapsulates the principal movements that characterise the modern age: romanticism, historicism, Fascism, relativism, irrationalism and nationalism. His ideas are always tied to the people who conceived them, so that abstractions are brought alive. 
 
EDITED BY HENRY HARDY AND ROGER HAUSHEER AND WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY ANDREW MARR

The Crooked Timber Of Humanity

A new, fully revised edition of Isaiah Berlin's magnificent history of ideas. Features a new foreword by John Banville.

Berlin restored the history of ideas to its true place as a key to unlock the past and explain the present. It was a notable achievement. This book sustains it.

To read Isaiah Berlin is above all to listen to a voice, effervescent, quizzical, often self-mocking, but always full of gaiety and amusement.

To read Berlin is to sit at an unlit window and see the landscape of European thought illuminated by a spectacular display of fireworks.

A history of ideas that possesses all the drama of a novel, all the immediacy of headline news.

'Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.' Immanuel Kant 
Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century - an activist of the intellect who marshalled vast erudition and eloquence in defence of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our own time: between the Platonic belief in absolute truth and the lure of authoritarianism; between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century Fascism; between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant - and sometimes genocidal - nationalism that convulses the modern world. 
 
This new edition features a revised text, a new foreword in which award-winning novelist John Banville discusses Berlin's life and ideas, particularly his defence of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides rich context, including letters and previously uncollected writings by Berlin, notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy.

Enlightening: Letters 1946 - 1960

The second volume of Isaiah Berlin's revelatory letters, spanning 1946-1960

Readers of Berlin's letters will find the same bubbling flow of malice, wit and human insight on the written page

A dazzling display of intellectual pyrotechnics

As well as being sometimes profoundly wise, these letters are often laugh-out-loud funny

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

Ironic, gossipy, witty, intermittently profound and always intensely human

'People are my landscape', Isaiah Berlin liked to say, and nowhere is the truth of this observation more evident than in his letters. He is a fascinated watcher of human beings in all their variety, and revels in describing them to his many correspondents. His letters combine ironic social comedy and a passionate concern for individual freedom. His interpretation of political events, historical and contemporary, and his views on how life should be lived, are always grounded in the personal, and his fiercest condemnation is reserved for purveyors of grand abstract theories that ignore what people are really like. 
 
This second volume of Berlin's letters takes up the story when, after war service in the United States, he returns to life as an Oxford don. Against the background of post-war austerity, the letters chart years of academic frustration and self-doubt, the intellectual explosion when he moves from philosophy to the history of ideas, his growing national fame as broadcaster and lecturer, the publication of some of his best-known works, his election to a professorship, and his reaction to knighthood. 
 
These are the years, too, of momentous developments in his private life: the bachelor don's loss of sexual innocence, the emotional turmoil of his father's death, his courtship of a married woman and transformation into husband and stepfather. Above all, these revealing letters vividly display Berlin's effervescent personality - often infuriating, but always irresistible.

Russian Thinkers

This revised edition has been completely re-set with an updated index and a new preface

Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkers is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in his most famous essay, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox,' Berlin considers the social and political circumstances that produced such men as Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky, and others of the Russian intelligentsia, who made up, as Berlin describes, 'the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world.'

The enduring vitality of Berlin's characterisation of Russian thought is demonstrated by the publication [...] of a new edition of Russian Thinkers, painstakingly revised and augmented by Henry Hardy ... a series of sparkling and sympathetic essays

The work of Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) covered a wide variety of subjects, mostly appearing in periodicals and symposia. Apart from Russian Thinkers, Isaiah Berlin's other contributions to Russian studies include his translation of Ivan Turgenev's First Love (available from Penguin) and his Introduction to Alexander Herzen's memoirs, My Past and Thoughts. Sir Isaiah was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1979 for the expression in his writings of the idea of the freedom of the individual in society.

Isaiah Berlin witnessed the excesses of the Russian Revolution as a child, and in becoming one of the key liberal intellects of the last century some of his most important contributions were on the subject of Russia and the concept of freedom. In the ten essays gathered here, Berlin addresses the great Russian minds of the nineteenth century: Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky and Tolstoy, as well as exploring the political and social revolutions they inspired and responded to. Berlin himself describes this extraordinary outpouring as &lsquo;the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world&rsquo;.

Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought

Political Ideas In The Romantic Age

Isaiah Berlin's longest continuous work - and therefore of key importance to anyone interested in the history of ideas.

An event of major importance... Hitherto, students of Berlin have been like explorers searching for the source of the Nile, but with only a network of streams to go by, not a single river; now they can stand on the shores of their very own Lake Victoria, gazing at the mighty reservoir itself

A dense, demanding, but often exciting book

Indispensable for anyone interested in the history of ideas and the development of liberal thought

A fine introduction to Berlin's thought, and a major addition to the corpus of his work

'I was exhausted at the end, &amp; yet I am sure that if ever I saw &amp; heard anyone in a true state of inspiration it was then.' 
 
So wrote a listener to her friend after attending one of the lectures based on the book. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age is the text Berlin wrote for four of the lectures, delivered in 1952. He revised what he had written extensively afterwards but never published it. It is his longest work and also the only connected account he gave of his key insights into the history of the ideas that dominate the political arguments of our own time. 
 
As he put it in his Prologue, 'The age of which we speak was singularly rich in original conceptions; they transformed our world, and the words in which they were formulated speak to us still'.

Letters 1928 - 1946

Flourishing

Flourishing is the first volume of a keenly awaited edition of the marvellously readable and entertaining letters of the most famous English intellectual of the last century.

Isiah Berlin was one of the great letter-writers of the twentieth century: witty, indiscreet, passionate, wise and unbuttoned. He also lived through extraordinary moments of twentieth-century history, and these letters capture those moments

Michael Ignatieff, author of Isiah Berlin: A Life

Reading this glorious collection of letters is, predictably, a heady experience... rich and irresistable

Full of insights about everyone and everything. He was an alpha-level gossip, the genius kind... a conversation of wit and substance that you never want to end

Berlin's letters are marvellously accessible, and as entertaining. During the two decades covered here his personality and career grow and bloom. In America, during the war, he writes a regular telegram to his anxious parents, often saying just 'Flourishing'; the word fits not only his wartime experience, but the whole of his early life, vividly displayed in this book in all its multi-faceted delightfulness.

Freedom And Its Betrayal

'Never before had someone addressed such abstract topics with such fluency and intensity - these lectures, while presupposing no specialist expertise, introduce some of the key issues in modern political theory in an enthusiastic and quite unpatronising way' Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

These lectures are astonishing for their lucidity and power

Berlin at his best: forceful without being bombastic, energetic without exaggerating, erudite without showing off

This is one of the most important books on the history of ideas in Berlin's oeuvre... Extremely compelling

Isaiah Berlin's celebrated radio lectures on six formative anti-liberal thinkers were delivered on the BBC's Third Programme in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years on. Freedom and its Betrayal is one of Isaiah Berlin's earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and the history of ideas, views which later found expression in such famous works as 'Two Concepts of Liberty', and were at the heart of his lifelong work on the Enlightenment and its critics. 
 
In his lucid examinations of sometimes difficult ideas Berlin demonstrates that a balanced understanding and a resilient defence of human liberty depend on learning both from the errors of freedom's alleged defenders and from the dark insights of its avowed antagonists. This book throws light on the early development of Berlin's ideas, and supplements his already published writings with fuller treatments of Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Saint-Simon, with the ultra-conservative traditionalist Maistre bringing up the rear. 
 
Freedom and its Betrayal shows Berlin at his liveliest and most torrentially spontaneous, testifying to his talents as a teacher of rare brilliance and impact. Listeners tuned in expectantly each week to the broadcasts and found themselves mesmerised by Berlin's astonishingly fluent extempore style. A leading historian of ideas, who was then a schoolboy, records that the lectures 'excited me so much that I sat, for every talk, on the floor beside the wireless, taking notes'. This excitement is at last recreated here for all to share.

The Power Of Ideas

'A volume which covers the key areas of Berlin's interests in an unusually accessible way; it will take its place as, quite simply, the best short introduction to his thinking' - Sunday Telegraph

Each of these essays fulfils Raymond Carver's criterion for the short story: to leave the reader's body temperature a degree higher or lower than when the book was opened

Shows how seriously he took the task of inspiring the general reader...displays the full breadth of his learning and experience

Berlin's description of Jews in contemporary Western society is brilliant, indeed dazzling

'Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilisation' - Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, 1958. 
 
The nineteen essays collected here show Isaiah Berlin at his most lucid: these short, introductory pieces provide the perfect starting point for the reader new to his work. Their linking theme is the crucial social and political role of ideas, and of their progenitors. The subjects vary widely - from philosophy to education, from Russia to Israel, from Marxism to romanticism - and the appositeness of Heine's warning is exemplified on a broad front. 
 
The contents include Berlin's last essay - a retrospective autobiographical survey and the classic statement of his Zionist views. As a whole the book exhibits the full range of his expertise, and demonstrates the enormously engaging individuality, as well as the power, of his own ideas.

The Roots of Romanticism

'These lectures represent Berlin at his best: quick-minded, erudite, witty and profound, and, above all, exciting.' John Banville, Irish Times

In an era where humane intellectual discourse has been deconstructed, intertextualised, phallicised and generally kicked senseless, Berlin's writing shines like a beacon

A profound, if often tantalising, contribution to an understanding of the West's culture... This is a book that would be as salutary a read for prime ministers and presidents as for those who see themselves as cultural critics

The Roots of Romanticism is the long-awaited text of Isaiah Berlin's most celebrated set of lectures, the Mellon Lectures, delivered in Washington in 1965 and heard since by a much wider audience on BBC radio. For Berli, the Romantics set in train a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notion of objective truth in ethicsm with incalculable, all-pervasive results. In his unscripted tour de force Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define romanticism, distils its essence, traces its development, and shows how its legacy permeates our outlook today.

Philosophical Essays

Concepts and Categories

'The most imaginative, distinguished and erudite of historians of ideas in this country' - Anthony Quinton, Spectator

Few writers and intellectuals command the awe and admiration accorded to Sir Isaiah Berlin, and with good reason. His wide-ranging erudition, humane scepticism and elegant prose set him apart

Isaiah Berlin's many admirers and readers will be glad to have this book; and those too young to have had the chance to listen to his lectures might well begin their acquaintance by reading it

He left the moral quality of his voice behind him, in the long tumbling paragraphs and the clauses within clauses of his best essays, and it is to these that we can turn when we need to remind ourselves what intellectual life can be: joyful, free of illusion, and vitally alive

His writing reflects the diversionary excursions, unexpected self-interruptions and recommencements, of a great talker... We are assured in his company of a supremely intelligent, highly civilized approach to whatever he touches upon

No one writes about large and abstract matters in a more richly nutritive and idiosyncratic way

Although Isaiah Berlin liked to say that he left philosophy for the history of ideas after the Second World War, there is a decided continuity between his more purely philosophical writings, most of which are collected in this volume, and the more historical work for which he is better known. 
 
Included here are Berlin's early arguments against logical positivism and later essays which more evidently reflect his life-long interest in political theory, intellectual history and the philosophy of history. 
 
In two related pieces he gives his view on the philosopher's task, to uncover the various models - the concepts and categories - that we bring to our experience, and that help to form it. In his own words 'The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not wildly, in the dark.'

Essays in the History of Ideas

Against the Current

Berlin's main theme in these essays is the importance in the history of thought of dissenters whose ideas  still challenge conventional wisdom.

A most remarkable intellectual achievement. There are few books published in our time which more dazzlingly illuminate some of the most crucial problems of western culture and civilisation

Berlin expounds with idea of half-forgotten thinkers with luminous clarity and imaginative empathy... exhilirating to read

The most imaginative, distinguished and erudite of historians of ideas in this country

Isaiah Berlin has a masterly grasp. He is one of the most concerned liberal minds in Europe

Berlin's main theme in these essays is the importance in the history of ideas of dissenters whose thinking still challenges conventional wisdom - among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen and Sorel. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, he brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times, and in the process offers a powerful defence of variety in our visions of life. 
 
Roger Hausheer's introduction surveys Berlin's whole oeuvre, and the full bibliography of his pubication has been updated for this Pimlico edition.

Studies in Ideas and their History

The Sense Of Reality

This collection at last makes available an important body of previously unknown work by one of our leading historians of ideas, and one of the finest essayists writing in English.

If it were possible to add to a reputation already so considerable, these essays would do it. All the productions of Berlin's long and distinguished career are characterised by urbanity, insight, profound scholarship and witty elegance. These traits are satisfyingly and instructively here present again

As with all Berlin's essays in the history of ideas, they exude a generous, sympathetic and large-minded enthusiasm for all sorts of thinkers and all sorts of ideas that make them a continuous pleasure to read

A superb example of philosophy for the interested layman

This volume is replete with wisdom and insight

Enormously stimulating...The spell of Berlin is very much present

Berlin's style conveys an unrivalled depth of learning in prose of engaging informality. A humane light shines through every sentence

Eight of the nine pieces in The Sense of Reality are published here for the first time. The range is characteristically wide: realism in history; judgement in politics; the special right of philosophers to self-expression; the history of socialism; the nature and impact of Marxism; the radical cultural revolution instigated by romanticism; the Russian notion of artistic commitment; the origins and practice of nationalism. The title essay, starting from the impossibility of recreating a bygone epoch, provides a superb centrepiece.

Isaiah Berlin

This is more than a collection of brilliantly perceptive portraits from the life of men as various as Churchill, Namier, Einstein, Pasternak. It is also a window into one of the wisest, most spacious and generous minds of our time

This is an amazingly enjoyable book from a very gifted and fortunate man

Marvellously good reading... A quarter of the entire volume is occupied by [an] essay in which Berlin recalls his meetings with Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. This last essay, in particular, is simply stunning

Welcoming and rewarding… This splendid book bring[s] the past to life. It lives for Berlin, and, thanks to him, it lives for us

It is one of Berlin's most endearing characteristics that he can admire so many utterly diverse people, that he can tell us about them all, and see the point of them’

It is hard to think of any other writer who is so penetrating, so amusing, and yet so entirely free of malice… No one, I believe, who reads his books could fail to recognise that they are in the presence of someone who is not only hugely gifted intellectually, but who is also the most sympathetic, ebullient ,and generous man whom they arc ever likely to encounter

An invigorating spectacle of the liberal mind at its most assured and unobstructed, glorying in the variety of human character and achievement which it is the chief purpose of liberalism to applaud and protect

Among men of learning in history and philosophy Isaiah Berlin is probably the most captivating expositor of ideas in the English-speaking world. The subject of Personal Impressions is men and women inhabited by intellects that blend with or distort their characters and become important personal visions… His writing has all the élan of conversation

A succession of portraits that in the end evokes the portrait of the author himself: a man of moral intuition and superb intelligence, of empathy and magnanimity, of unerring sharpness and style

The third, enlarged edition of Isaiah Berlin's remarkable series of character portraits, Personal Impressions 
 
Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova: Isaiah Berlin’s Personal Impressions collects the essayist and intellectual historian’s most remarkable portraits of prominent twentieth-century thinkers, writers and politicians. 
 
For this third, enlarged edition, ten new pieces have been added, including portraits of David Ben-Gurion, Maynard and Lydia Keynes, and Stephen Spender, as well as Berlin's autobiographical reflections on Jewish Oxford and his Oxford undergraduate years. Rich and enlightening, Personal Impressions is a vibrant demonstration of Berlin's belief that ideas truly live only through people.

Isaiah Berlin

Praise for Personal Impressions

This is more than a collection of brilliantly perceptive portraits from the life of men as various as Churchill, Namier, Einstein, Pasternak. It is also a window into one of the wisest, most spacious and generous mi ...

This is an amazingly enjoyable book from a very gifted and fortunate man

Marvellously good reading... A quarter of the entire volume is occupied by [an] essay in which Berlin recalls his meetings with Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. This last essay, in particular, is simpl ...

This is more than a collection of brilliantly perceptive portraits from the life of men as various as Churchill, Namier, Einstein, Pasternak. It is also a window into one of the wisest, most spacious and generous mi ...

This is an amazingly enjoyable book from a very gifted and fortunate man

Marvellously good reading... A quarter of the entire volume is occupied by [an] essay in which Berlin recalls his meetings with Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. This last essay, in particular, is simpl ...

This is more than a collection of brilliantly perceptive portraits from the life of men as various as Churchill, Namier, Einstein, Pasternak. It is also a window into one of the wisest, most spacious and generous mi ...

This is an amazingly enjoyable book from a very gifted and fortunate man

Marvellously good reading... A quarter of the entire volume is occupied by [an] essay in which Berlin recalls his meetings with Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. This last essay, in particular, is simpl ...

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