Isaiah Berlin: Volume 1 by Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin: Volume 1 by Isaiah Berlin

This first volume of letters inaugurates a keenly awaited edition of Berlin's letters. Berlin's life was enormously worth living, both for himself and for us; and fortunately he said a great deal to his friends on paper as well as in person. When this volume opens Berlin is eighteen, a pupil at St Paul's School in London. He becomes an undergraduate at Oxford, then a Fellow at All Souls, where he writes his famous biography of Karl Marx. When that is complete he moves to New College to teach philosophy, and after the outbreak of the Second World War sails to America in somewhat mysterious circumstances with Guy Burgess. He stays in the USA, working for the British Government (apart from visits home and his famous trip to the Soviet Union in 1945-6) until July 1946, when he returns to Oxford, and the volume closes.

'Isaiah Berlin was one of the great letter writers of the twentieth century: witty, indiscrete, passionate, wise and unbuttonedHe also lived through extraordinary moments of 20th century history, and these letters capture these moments: Nazi brown shirts in Austrian cafes in the 1930s, German refugees in Jerusalem, the debates at All Souls about the war, Washington during the height of the Churchill-Roosevelt alliance. In Henry Hardy, Berlin has found an ideal editor: scrupulous, self-effacing, dogged and tenaciously accurate. The result is one of the great editing achievements in modern letters.' Michael Ignatieff, author of Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia, and in Petrograd in 1917 Berlin witnessed both Revolutions - Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents emigrated to England, where he was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Apart from his war service in New York, Washington, Moscow and Leningrad, he remained at Oxford thereafter - as a Fellow of All Souls, then of New College, as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, and as founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy.

His published work includes Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521833684
ISBN 10	052183368X
Title	Isaiah Berlin: Volume 1
Author	Isaiah Berlin
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2004-06-04
Number of pages	752
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable