Isaiah Berlin: Letters 1928-1946 - Hardcover

Berlin, Isaiah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 052183368X ISBN 13: 9780521833684

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Synopsis

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 I respect 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

About this title

Book Description:

When this volume opens Berlin is eighteen. He becomes an undergraduate at Oxford, then a Fellow at All Souls, where he writes his famous biography of Karl Marx. When that is complete he moves to New College to teach philosophy, and after the outbreak of the Second World War sails to America in somewhat mysterious circumstances with Guy Burgess. He stays in the USA, working for the British Government until July 1946, when he returns to Oxford, and the volume closes.

Review:

"Meticulously edited and ably annotated by the indefatigable Hardy, this first installment of a projected three-volume set of correspondence provides an indispensable window into the soul and mind of one of the 20th century's most notable intellectual figures. Highly recommended." H.I. Einsohn, Middlesex Community College, Choice

"Most of us will never have the pleasure of receiving such fine letters, especially after what Hardy labels 'the e-change,' but this wonderful book allows us to read, with delight, over the shoulders of those who did." Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto, author of Catch & Release

"This first selected volume of the celebrated philosopher's prodigious correspondence reveals an intimately charming 'Shaya' (as he familiarly signed himself) to match the erudite Oxford don and brilliant conversationalist. With Berlin's sizable social circles, penchant for name-dropping and ubiquitous scholarly illusions, Hardy's numerous footnotes are indispensable (and sometimes wryly amusing). Likewise, his choice of supplementary material, from interviews to Berlin's early school essay on freedom, enriches a collection alreadly overflowing with Berlin's favorite subjects: intellectual insights and indiscreet gossip." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Isaiah Berlin was one of the great letter writers of the twentieth century, witty, indiscreet, passionate, wise and unbuttoned. He also lived through extraordinary moments of 20th century history, and these letters capture these moments: Nazi brown shirts in Austrian cafes in the 1930's, German refugees in Jerusalem, the debates at All Souls about the war, Washington during the height of the Churchill-Roosevelt alliance. In Henry Hardy, Berlin has found an ideal editor: scrupulous, self-effacing, dogged and tenaciously accurate. The result is one of the great editing achievements in modern letters." Michael Ignatieff, author of Isaiah Berlin: A Life

"I find Isaiah Berlin's letters fascinating and cannot bear to put the book down. What a brilliant correspondent he was! And how superbly annotated and edited the book is!" Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and the National Book Award

"A fascinating record of an inexhaustibly rich life. Berlin's collected letters give an unsurpassed insight into the mind of one of the twentieth century's great liberal thinkers--and a unique perspective on the twentieth century itself." John Gray, London School of Economics

"... a great act of reclamation." Financial Times

"Isaiah Berlin had a genius for friendship and a huge personal appeal that communicates itself in print; and 'Letters, 1928-1946' is compulsive reading..." The New York Times Book Review

"Most of us will never have the pleasure of receiving such fine letters, especially after what Hardy labels "the e-change, but this wonderful book allows us to read, with delight, over the shoulders that did." Globe and Mail

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 052183368X
• ISBN 13: 9780521833684
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 752
• Editor: Hardy Henry