Isaiah Berlin: A Life

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Macmillan, Oct 15, 1999 - Biography & Autobiography - 356 pages
Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in Riga in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. Biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defer of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny, Berlin was the presiding judge of intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time. But Berlin's life was not only a life of the mind. From Albert Einstein to Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill to Anna Akhmatova, his circle of friends constitutes a veritable who's who of twentieth-century art, politics, and philosophy. In this definitive work, the result of a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject, Michael Ignatieff charts the emergence of a unique temperament and a singular vision.

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Contents

Albany
1
Riga
10
Petrograd
20
London
33
Oxford
46
All Souls
62
The Brethren
77
New York
97
Cold War
189
Late Awakening
208
Fame
221
Liberal at Bay
244
Wolfson
259
Retrospect
273
Epilogue
291
Acknowledgements
303

Washington
109
Moscow
135
Leningrad
148
The Tribe
170
Notes
308
Index
339
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About the author (1999)

Michael Ignatieff is a regular contributor to "The New Yorker "and T"he New York Review of Books." He is the author of "The Warrior's Honor" (Metropolitan Books, 0-8050-5519-3), "The Russian Album," "The Needs of Strangers," and "Scar Tissue," a novel short-listed for the Booker Prize. He lives in London.

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