Book description
'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.
Sir Isaiah Berlin, O. M., was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909. He came
to England in 1919 and was educated at St Paul's School and Corpus
Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford, he was a a Fellow of All Souls
College (1932-8, 1950-67), a Fellow of New College (1938-50), Chichele
Professor of Social and Political Theory (1957-67), first President of
Wolfson College (1966-75), and President of the British Academy from
1974 to 1978. His achievements as a historian and expositor of ideas
earned him the Erasmus, Lippincott, and Agnelli Prizes, and his lifelong
defence of civil liberties earned him the Jerusalem Prize. He died in
1997.
