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Isaiah Berlin: Volume 1 - Letters, 1928-1946 (Hardcover, New)
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Isaiah Berlin: Volume 1 - Letters, 1928-1946 (Hardcover, New)
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Isaiah Berlin is one of the towering intellectual figures of the
twentieth century, the most famous English thinker of the post-war
era, and the focus of growing interest and discussion. Above all,
he is one of the best modern exponents of the disappearing art of
letter-writing. 'Life is not worth living unless one can be
indiscreet to intimate friends, ' wrote Berlin to a correspondent.
This first volume inaugurates a long awaited edition of his letters
that might well adopt this remark as an epigraph. Berlin's life was
well worth living, both for himself and for the world. Fortunately
he said a great deal to his friends on paper as well as in person.
Berlin's letters reveal the significant growth and development of
his personality and career over the two decades covered within
them. Starting with his days as an eighteen year old student at St.
Paul's School in London, they cover his years at Oxford as scholar
and professor and the authorship of his famous biography of Karl
Marx. The letters progress to his World War II stay in the U.S. and
finally, his trip to the Soviet Union in 1945-6 and return to
Oxford in 1946. "Emotional exploitation, cannibalism, which I think
I dislike more than anything else in the world." To Ben Nicolson,
September 1937 "Valery delivered an agreeable but dull lecture
here. He said words were like thin planks over precipices, and if
you crossed rapidly nothing happened, but if you stopped on any of
them and stared into the gulf you would get vertigo and that was
what philosophers were doing." To Cressida Bonham Carter, March
1939 "I never don't moralize." To Mary Fisher, 18 April 1940 "I
only feel happy when I feel the solidarity of the majority of
people Irespect with and behind me." To Marion Frankfurter, 23
August 1940 "Certainly no politics are more real than those of
academic life, no loves deeper, no hatreds more burning, no
principles more sacred." To Freya Stark, 12 June 1944 "Nobody is so
fiercely bureaucratic, or so stern with soldiers and regular civil
servants, as the don disguised as temporary government official
armed with an indestructible superiority complex." To Freya Stark,
12 June 1944 "My view on this is that you will not find life in the
country lively enough for persons of your temperament. Life in the
country in England depends entirely on (a) motor cars (b) rural
tastes. As you possess neither, it is my considered view that apart
from a weekend cottage or something of that sort, life in the
country would bore you stiff within a very short time." To his
parents, 31 January 1944 "This country is undoubtedly the largest
assembly of fundamentally benevolent human beings ever gathered
together, but the thought of staying here remains a nightmare." To
his parents, 31 January 1944 "I am a hopeless dilettante about
matters of fact really and only good for a column of gossip, if
that." To W. J. Turner, 12 June 1945 "England is an old chronic
complaint: every day in the afternoon in the left knee and the left
leg below the kneecap, tiresome, annoying, not bad enough to go to
bed with, probably incurable and madly irritating but not
necessarily unlikely to lead to a really serious crisis unless
complications set in." To Angus Malcolm, 20 February 1946
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