Isaiah Berlin refused to write an autobiography, but he agreed to talk about himself-and so for ten years, before Berlin's death in November 1997, he allowed Michael Ignatieff to interview him about his past, his ideas, his most intimate memories, his inner conflicts. This is an extraodinary biography, full of Berlin's own voice and presence, supplemented by untouched personal archives. It will be the authoritative biography for decades. Isiah Berlin (1909-97) was one of the greatest and most humane of modern philosophers; historian of the Russian intellgentisia, biographer of Marx, pioneering scholar of the Romantic movement and defender of the liberal idea of freedom. His own life was caught up in the most powerful currents of the century. The son of a Riga timber merchant, as a child in St Petersburg he witnessed the Russian Revolution: when his family came to England in 1921 he plunged into suburban school life and the ferment of 1930s Oxford; as a member of All Souls he was part of the British intellectual establishment. During the war, he was at the Anglo-American diplomacy in Washington; afterwards, in Moscow he saw the grim despair of Stalinism. This book is full of memorable meetings with Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, with Churchill, with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova.
