Personal Impressions

by Isaiah Berlin

Overview

Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova: Isaiah Berlin’s Personal Impressions collects the essayist and intellectual historian’s most remarkable portraits of prominent twentieth-century thinkers, writers and politicians. For this third, enlarged 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's belief that ideas truly live only through people.
Read more at https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1045599/personal-impressions/#io0eqYu0FkholcGF.99

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781845952495
Publisher:	Random House UK
Publication date:	01/01/2019
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Isaiah Berlin was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Apart from his war service in New York, Washington, Moscow, and Leningrad, he remained at Oxford thereafter, as a Fellow of All Souls, then of New College, as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, and as founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. His published work includes Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind, and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott, and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defense of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

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

What People are Saying About This

Mitchell Cohen

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

Editorial Reviews

Only the title is bland. The contents of this fourth and final volume of Isaiah Berlin's ''Selected Writings'' bear the distinctive stamp of one of the great thinkers and writers of our age. The general reader, unfamiliar with his work, or put off by the formidable subject matter of the earlier volumes will find Personal Impressions altogether welcoming and rewarding.
— New York Times

Donald R. Stanski

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


[Berlin's] writing has all the élan of conversation. [His] sense of humor . . . Preserves a frank delight in human contradiction.—-V. S. Pritchett, New York Review of Books


Contains many amusing and revealing anecdotes.—-Dan Jacobson, Times Literary Supplement


An amazingly enjoyable book.—-Christopher Hitchens, New Statesman


Marvellously good reading.—-Alan Ryan, Sunday Times


A thrilling and agreeable work. . . . [W]armly commended.—-Peter 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.—-Anthony 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.—-Mary 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.—-Anthony Quinton, Encounter


"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

From the Publisher

Welcoming and rewarding. . . . [Berlin] is at his most conversational. This splendid book bring[s] the past to life.

New York Times Book Review - Peter Stansky

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