This collection of pen-portraits of the renowned public intellectual Isaiah Berlin, published to mark the centenary of his birth, brings him vividly to life from many vantage-points: essential reading for all who seek to understand the full range of his impact. Isaiah Berlin was born a century ago. One of the most celebrated British thinkers of the twentieth century, he was a tireless champion of freedom and diversity against control and conformity. His generous, open vision of life is displayed with special immediacy in his brilliant pen-portraits of contemporaries, Personal Impressions, in which he sees the point of radically differing personalities, enters into their distinctive outlooks, and describeshis encounters with them, in arrestingly idiosyncratic prose. The Book of Isaiah turns the tables on Berlin, offering a series of personal impressions of him and his ideas by a range of people who knew him, or have been affected by his work. This multi-faceted testimony enriches and supplements Michael Ignatieff's celebrated authorised biography. The volume includes tributes written when Berlin died, essays specially commissioned from friends and from students of his work, and a previously unpublished family memoir by Berlin's father, which preserves for his son, and for posterity, the story of his Hasidic forebears, and of the many relatives murdered by the Nazis. The result is a collection indispensable both for existing enthusiasts and for those who are curious to learn about Berlin's unique, compelling appeal. HENRY HARDY is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and one of Isaiah Berlin's Literary Trustees.

Anatoly Genrikovich Naiman, poet, novelist, critic and literary translator, was born in 1936 into a family of followers of Tolstoy. Having studied as an engineer, he became one of the Leningrad group of young poets (including his friend Joseph Brodsky) around Anna Akhmatova, whose literary secretary he became from 1962 until her death in 1966, and about whom he wrote the invaluable and popular memoir, "Remembering Anna Akhmatova." In 2001 two of his novels (most recently "Sir") was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize.

Naiman's work as critic, memoirist and translator (of Leopardi, Provencal poets, and T. S. Eliot, among others) has often eclipsed his own poetry. "Lions and Acrobats"--a selection of work from his first four books of poetry in Russian--displays, for the first time in English, the full breadth of Naiman's poetic output.

Anatoly Naiman has been a fellow at Oxford University and at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center and has lectured on Russian literature at a host of universities in Europe and the United States.

Frank Reeve is a poet, scholar, anthologist and author of a dozen books of translation from Russian and reportage on Russian affairs, including "Five Short Novels by Turgenev," the two-volume "Anthology of Russian Plays," "The Garden" (poems by Bella Akhmadulina) and "Robert Frost in Russia," which was also published by Zephyr Press.

Margo Shohl Rosen, poet and translator, is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University's Department of Slavic Languages. Her translations have been published in the "London Review of Books" and the "Mississippi Review." Her own poetry has appeared in "Oktiabr'." In 2004 she was co-winner of the Slavic department's Pushkin Prize for best poetry translation.