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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's belief that ideas truly live
only through people.
Isaiah Berlin's intellectual biography of Karl Marx has long
been recognized as one of the best concise accounts of the life and
thought of the man who had, in Berlin's words, a more "direct,
deliberate, and powerful" influence on mankind than any other
nineteenth-century thinker. A brilliantly lucid work of synthesis
and exposition, the book introduces Marx's ideas and sets them in
their context, explains why they were revolutionary in political
and intellectual terms, and paints a memorable portrait of Marx's
dramatic life and outsized personality. Berlin takes readers
through Marx's years of adolescent rebellion and post-university
communist agitation, the personal high point of the 1848
revolutions, and his later years of exile, political frustration,
and intellectual effort. Critical yet sympathetic, Berlin's account
illuminates a life without reproducing a legend.
New features of this thoroughly revised edition include
references for Berlin's quotations and allusions, Terrell Carver's
assessment of the distinctiveness of Berlin's book, and a revised
guide to further reading.
Isaiah Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth
century - a man who set ideas on fire. His defence of liberty and
plurality was passionate and persuasive and inspired a generation.
His ideas - especially his reasoned rejection of excessive
certainty and political despotism - have become even more prescient
and vital today. But who was the man behind such influential views?
In Search of Isaiah Berlin tells the compelling story of a
decades-long collaboration between Berlin and his editor, Henry
Hardy, who made it his vocation to bring Berlin's huge body of work
into print. Hardy discovered that Berlin had written far more than
people thought, much of it unpublished. As he describes his
struggles with Berlin, who was almost on principle unwilling to
have his work published, an intimate and revealing picture of the
self-deprecating philosopher emerges. This is a unique portrait of
a man who gave us a new way of thinking about the human
predicament, and whose work had for most of his life remained
largely out of view.
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Russian Thinkers (Paperback, 2 Rev Ed)
Isaiah Berlin; Edited by Aileen Kelly, Henry Hardy; Introduction by Aileen Kelly
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R350
R287
Discovery Miles 2 870
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Required reading for fans of Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of
Utopia"-the landmark investigation into Russian history and thought
Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively
as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. "Russian
Thinkers" is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's
outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In
addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in
his most famous essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Berlin considers
the social and political circumstances that produced such men as
Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky, and others of the Russian
intelligentsia, who made up, as Berlin describes, "the largest
single Russian contribution to social change in the world."
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