Isaiah Berlin A Life

Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. The son of a Riga merchant and the first Jew elected to a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford, he was a presiding judge of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic for sixty years: a historian of the Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defender of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time.

But Berlin's life was not only a life of the mind. Present at the crucial events of our age, he was in Washington during World War II and in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War. From Albert Einstein to Virginia Woolf, from Winston Churchill to Anna Akhmatova, his circle of friends constitute a veritable who's who of 20th century art, politics, and philosophy.

For this definitive biography -- the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject -- Michael Ignatieff interviewed Berlin extensively and was granted complete access to his papers, one of the largest archives in Anglo-American cultural history. A magisterial work, illuminating and beautifully written, Isaiah Berlin is destined to take its place among the great modern biographies.

 Author: Michael Ignatieff

Publisher: Penguin

Released Date: 2000

ISBN: 9780140268577