'The First And The Last' brings together the earliest known composition and the last essay written by Sir Isaiah Berlin, who died in November 1997.
'The Purpose Justifies The Ways', written when he was twelve years old, and based on a real murder in St Petersburg, is his first known piece of writing, as well as his only story. Henry Hardy sees it as "pointing forward to Berlin's repeated later insistence on the inadmissibility of justifying present suffering as a route to some future state of bliss. In this sense the story is the first recorded step on his intellectual journey through life, a journey summarised in his last essay, 'My Intellectual Path', written seventy-four years later in 1996."
Reflections and observations on Sir Isaiah Berlin's life and work are provided by Stuart Hampshire, Avishai Margalit, Bernard Williams, Aileen Kelly and Noel Annan.
