by Michael Ignatieff (Author)
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.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
Edition: New e.
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 06 Jan 2000
ISBN 10: 0099577313
ISBN 13: 9780099577317
Book Overview: 'I do not see how there could be a more insightful, more erudite, biography of this remarkable man' Doris Lessing, Times Literary Supplement
Prizes: Shortlisted for James Tait Black Memorial Book Prizes: Biography 2000 and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize: Non-fiction 1999 and HH Wingate/Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize 1999.