Isaiah Berlin: A Life

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 timber 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: 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, in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War, in Israel as the new state came into being. For this definitive biography - the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject - Michael Ignatieff, himself a leading public intellectual, interviewed Berlin extensively and was granted complete access to his papers, one of the largest archives in Anglo-American cultural history. Ignatieff charts the emergence of a unique liberal temperament - serene, comic, secular, and unafraid - and he examines its influence on Berlin's vision of liberalism, which stressed the often tragic nature of political and moral choice.

FROM THE CRITICS

Ralf Dahrendorf - Sunday Times (London)

A rare gem of a book. We knew we had to read Isaiah Berlin's writing, but now also know that his long and extraordinary life has as much to tell us.

Ian Buruma - New Republic

Michel Ignatieff has written a fine biography in the spirit of his subject. . .entertaining without ever lacking in seriousness.

Richard Bernstein - New York Times

. . .[A]dmirable, clearheaded and readable. . .[that] explains why Berlin is celebrated. . .[and] why the celebration is justified. . . .[I]t would be difficult in light of the experience of the century to come up with a clearer and more humane political credo than the one we owe to Isaiah Berlin.

Noel Annan - Literary Review(London)

A fine biography of the most remarkable intellectual of his generation.

Steven Marcus

A touching portrait and a labor of love. . .a rounded view of an extraordinarily distinguished mind. —The New York Times Book Review Read all 15 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Michael Ignatieff