Book description
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.
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.
Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah
Berlin's Literary Trustees. He has edited several other books by Berlin.
