Personal Impressions
Isaiah Berlin
Edited by Henry Hardy
With an introduction by Noel Annan

Expanded Edition

Paper | 2001 | $25.95 / £14.95
328 pp. | 6 x 9 | 18 halftones

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This remarkable collection contains Isaiah Berlin's appreciations of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the intellectual or political world, sometimes both. The names of many of them are familiar: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, and others. With the exception of Roosevelt, he met them all and knew many of them well. For this expanded edition, four new portraits have been added, including those of Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson. This volume also contains a vivid and moving account of Berlin's meetings in Russia with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. Perhaps the most fascinating of these "personal impressions" is found in the epilogue, where Berlin describes the three strands in his own personality: Russian, English, and Jewish.

Isaiah Berlin was, until his death in 1997, a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was renowned as an essayist and as the author of many books, among them Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, and from Princeton, Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, and Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin's literary trustees. He has edited several other volumes by Berlin, and is currently preparing Berlin's letters and remaining unpublished writings for publication.

Review:

"Welcoming and rewarding. . . . [Berlin] is at his most conversational. This splendid book bring[s] the past to life."--Peter Stansky, New York Times Book Review

Endorsement:

"Berlin was one of the foremost intellectuals in the English language--one of the finest historians of ideas in the latter half of the century and a rightly celebrated political thinker. . . . These essays tell us about him as well as his subjects."--Mitchell Cohen, City University of New York

Table of Contents:

List of illustrations viii
Author's preface to the first edition ix
Editor's preface xi
Introduction by Noel Annan xv
Winston Churchill in 1940 1
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt 24
Chaim Weizmann 34
Einstein and Israel 66
Yitzhak Sadeh 78
L. B. Namier 91
Felix Frankfurter at Oxford 112
Richard Pares 120
Hubert Henderson at All Souls 125
J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy 130
John Petrov Plamenatz 146
Maurice Bowra 154
David Cecil 160
Memories of Virginia Woolf 168
Edmund Wilson at Oxford 172
Auberon Herbert 183
Aldous Huxley I89
Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956 198
Epilogue: The Three Strands in My Life 255
Index 261

Other Princeton books by Isaiah Berlin:

• Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas.
• Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays.
• The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas.
• Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty.
• Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought.
• The Power of Ideas.
• The Roots of Romanticism.
• Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder.

Other Princeton books by Henry Hardy:

• Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas.
• Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays.
• The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas.
• Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty.
• Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought.
• The Power of Ideas.
• The Roots of Romanticism.
• Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder.

Link:

• Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library

Subject Areas:

• Philosophy
• British Literature
• Comparative Literature
• Political Philosophy

Hardcover published by Viking in 1981

Paper: Not for sale in the Commonwealth (except Canada) and the European Union

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