Book description
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.
