Book description
This enthusiastically received collection contains Isaiah Berlin's
appreciation of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the
intellectual or political world - sometimes in both. The names of many
of them are familiar - Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim
Weizmann, Albert Einstein, L. B. Namier, J. L. Austin, Maurice Bowra.
With the exception of Roosevelt he met them all, and he knew many of
them well.
For this new edition four new portraits have been added, including
recollections of Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson. The volume ends
with a vivid and moving account of Berlin's meetings in Russia with
Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956.
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.
