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.

"Changing Enemies is one of the last accounts we shall have by a witness to some of the high-level decision making during the war and its immediate aftermath. . . . Lord Annan's book valuably points to the contribution to German democracy that was distinctively British." Michael R. Beschloss, New York Times Book Review"In this crackling tale, former British intelligence officer Annan offers an insider's view of the military espionage that helped the Allies win the war against Hitler. . . . He vividly describes power struggles among the Allied forces occupying Germany, his work in guiding post-Nazi Germany toward multi-party democracy, and] his friendship with Konrad Adenauer." Publishers Weekly"A graceful and crystal style like Noel Annan's, all but absent from most contemporary political and historical literature, is enough to awaken an American reader's slumbering literary Anglophilia." David Mehegan, Boston Globe"One of the best books ever written about military intelligence during World War II." William Roger Louis, University of Texas, and Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford"