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The definitive biography - based on years of intimate interviews and unpublished archives.

Reviews

Ignatieff (The Warrior's Honor, LJ 1/98) met and conferred with Berlin periodically over a ten-year period until Berlin's death at the age of 88 in 1997. He also spent hours talking to Berlin's wife and friends and had complete access to his papers and a collection of his letters. Berlin also "opened himself up" fully to Ignatieff, which has resulted in an intimate, revealing portrait of a man who knew just about everybody of importance in his lifetime‘artists, musicians, writers, philosophers, politicians. The account is more or less chronological, from Berlin's birth in Riga, Latvia, to his emigration to London at age 11, to his appointment to teach philosophy at Oxford, to his wartime diplomatic service in America and Europe, and his subsequent abandoning of academic philosophy to pursue political theory and the history of ideas, especially the ideas of liberty and freedom. A good biography should leave readers feeling that they know the subject intimately, and this is definitely a good biography. For both academic and public libraries.‘Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washingon, DC

Over the last 10 years of Isaiah Berlin's life (1909-1997), Ignatieff tape-recorded conversations with the philosopher in what he describes as "a virtuoso display of a great intelligence doing battle with loss." Because this biography is based primarily on these talks‘as well as on interviews with Berlin's widow, friends, students and colleagues‘the tone is informally conversational rather than pedantically authoritative. After a prosperous childhood in Latvia, Berlin's family was forced to move to London, where young Isaiah absorbed the British values of decency, the toleration of dissent and the importance of liberty over efficiency. At Oxford, he developed intellectually under the likes of Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, R.G. Collingwood, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf. Berlin did well at Oxford‘he was elected Tutor at New College, Fellow of All Souls‘but with war coming, he welcomed a chance to work for the Ministry of Information, first in the U.S., where his brilliant wartime dispatches (avidly read by Churchill) established his reputation in both Britain and America, and later as part of a Foreign Office team in Moscow (where he met Boris Pasternak) and Leningrad (where he began his transformative friendship with Anna Akhmatova). Throughout the book, Ignatieff concentrates on his subject's conversation and flow of ideas. Berlin championed freedom but not dogmatically. In his view, to be true to human nature in its diversity, we have to embrace contradictory values; otherwise, we lose our humanity. Ignatieff's biography is worthy of its subject, lucidly explaining how this "Paganini of words" used philosophy to defend civilized society. (Nov.)