Title

Isaiah Berlin : a life.

Description

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."--BOOK JACKET.

Identifier

754903

805055207

Creator

Ignatieff, Michael

Format

1st American ed.

Source

Brian Lamb Booknotes Collection

Gift of Brian Lamb, 2011.

Catalog record

Language

eng

Date

1998

Program air date: January 24, 1999

Publisher

Metropolitan Books

George Mason University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives

Text

Transcription of Annotations
Extensive notes on the front endpapers, front free flysheet, half-title and title page, and dedication page. Details on Berlin's life/background, Romanticism, friends, philosophy, politics. Questions like: "Why do authors use Spanish/German and French without translation." Health, interests, extramarital affairs, gossip, interactions with Georgetown Elite. Notes/Underlinings: description of Berlin's voice, his memory, early life, family, Judaism, Lubavich Hassidim, move to London, talkative, God, literary influences, University, literary figures he knew--Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, William Butler Yeats, Boris Pasternak, etc., Zionism, Freud, spent WWII in US, NY/DC. Hayek, Donald McLean, George Kennan, Adlai Stevenson, thoughts on communism/fascism, relationships, family.

Subject

"Berlin, Isaiah, 1909-1997."

"Philosophers--Great Britain--Biography."

Relation

Original Booknotes interview

Rights

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