Conversations with Isaiah Berlin

About this book

A celebrated master of the spoken as well as the written word, Isaiah Berlin here gives us a rare memoir in the form of a dialogue. Isaiah Berlin is renowned the world over for his analysis of the ideas that have influenced or transformed societies. He has a deep commitment to liberty and pluralism, and has devoted the half century and more of his professional life as a teacher and lecturer to exploring the conditions that allow these ideals to flourish, and those that threaten them. Berlin here intersperses insights into the development of his ideas and political philosophy with rich personal reminiscences. He discusses Machiavelli, Marx, Vico, Herder, and Herzen, among others, and their influence over him. As he leads us from Petrograd to Oxford, Washington, Moscow, London, and Jerusalem, he speaks of his friends and contemporaries: W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Igor Stravinsky, A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and many others. He tells of his moving encounters with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Chaim Weizmann, and of his passion for music and literature. Frank and engaging, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin is a remarkable record of one of the great intellectual odysseys of our time.