In this collection of remarkable biographical portraits, the great essayist and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin brings to life a wide range of prominent twentieth-century thinkers, politicians, and writers. These include Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova. With the exception of Roosevelt, Berlin met them all, and he knew many of them well. Other figures recalled here include the Zionist Yitzhak Sadeh, the U.S. Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter, the classicist and wit Maurice Bowra, the philosopher J. L. Austin, and the literary critic Edmund Wilson. For this edition, ten new pieces have been added, including portraits of David Ben-Gurion, Maynard and Lydia Keynes, and Stephen Spender, as well as Berlin’s autobiographical reflections on Jewish Oxford and his Oxford undergraduate years. Rich and enlightening, Personal Impressions is a vibrant demonstration of Berlin鈥檚 belief that ideas truly live only through people.
Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was one of the leading intellectual historians of the twentieth century and the founding president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. His many books include The Hedgehog and the Fox, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, and The Roots of Romanticism (all 91桃色).
"Welcoming and rewarding. . . . [Berlin] is at his most conversational. This splendid book bring[s] the past to life."鈥擯eter Stansky, New York Times Book Review
"[Berlin's] writing has all the 茅lan of conversation. [His] sense of humor . . . Preserves a frank delight in human contradiction."鈥擵. S. Pritchett, New York Review of Books
"Contains many amusing and revealing anecdotes."鈥擠an Jacobson, Times Literary Supplement
"An amazingly enjoyable book."鈥擟hristopher Hitchens, New Statesman
"Marvellously good reading."鈥擜lan Ryan, Sunday Times
"A thrilling and agreeable work. . . . [W]armly commended."鈥擯eter Jay, Washington Post Book World
"An enthralling collection. . . . It is hard to think of any other writer who is so penetrating, so amusing, and yet so entirely free of malice."鈥擜nthony Storr, Spectator
"Marvellous. . . . It is one of Berlin's most endearing characteristics that he can admire so many utterly diverse people, that he can tell us about them all, and see the point of them."鈥擬ary Warnock, Listener
"Provides an invigorating spectacle of the liberal mind at its most assured and unobstructed, glorying in the variety of human character and achievement."鈥擜nthony Quinton, Encounter
"Berlin was one of the foremost intellectuals in the English language鈥攐ne 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."鈥擬itchell Cohen, City University of New York
