Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Isaiah Berlin: A Life

by Michael Ignatieff (Author)

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.

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More Information

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.

Media Reviews
A work of literature and an eloquent portrait...an explanation of this most remarkable twentieth-century figure...Though Berlin will be the subject of many future studies, one cannot imagine anyone feeling the need to improve on this biography * Observer *
Enthralling...More than an authorised biography...An affectionate and admiring, but none the less independently-minded portrait...A serious book, but also a vivid, lively and uplifting one * Evening Standard *
Reading Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin, you feel you are understanding not only Isaiah Berlin, but the history...I do not see how there could be a more insightful, more erudite, biography of this remarkable man -- Doris Lessing * Times Literary Supplement *
A rare gem of a book...It will add a new dimension to the afterlife of the philosopher * Sunday Times *
Brings off the near-impossible - a lifelike portrait of a man who was loved by his friends not for what he wrote, but what he said -- Humphrey Carpenter * Sunday Times Books of the Year *