Description
Book SynopsisThe third, enlarged edition of Isaiah Berlin's remarkable series of character portraits, Personal Impressions
Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova: Isaiah Berlin’s Personal Impressions collects the essayist and intellectual historian’s most remarkable portraits of prominent twentieth-century thinkers, writers and politicians.
For this third, enlarged edition, ten new pieces have been added, including portraits of David Ben-Gurion, Maynard and Lydia Keynes, and Stephen Spender, as well as Berlin's autobiographical reflections on Jewish Oxford and his Oxford undergraduate years. Rich and enlightening, Personal Impressions is a vibrant demonstration of Berlin's belief that ideas truly live only through people.
Trade ReviewThis is more than a collection of brilliantly perceptive portraits from the life of men as various as Churchill, Namier, Einstein, Pasternak. It is also a window into one of the wisest, most spacious and generous minds of our time * Observer *
This is an amazingly enjoyable book from a very gifted and fortunate man -- Christopher Hitchens * New Statesman *
Marvellously good reading... A quarter of the entire volume is occupied by [an] essay in which Berlin recalls his meetings with Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. This last essay, in particular, is simply stunning -- Alan Ryan * Sunday Times *
Welcoming and rewarding… This splendid book bring[s] the past to life. It lives for Berlin, and, thanks to him, it lives for us -- Peter Stansky * New York Times Book Review *
It is one of Berlin's most endearing characteristics that he can admire so many utterly diverse people, that he can tell us about them all, and see the point of them’ -- Mary Warnock * Listener *
