Personal impressions / Isaiah Berlin ; edited by Henry Hardy ; afterword by Noel Annan ; foreword by Hermione Lee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Berlin, Isaiah, 1909-1997, author.

Annan, Noel Gilroy Annan, Baron, 1916-2000, author of afterword.

Lee, Hermione, author of foreword.

Contributor:

Hardy, Henry, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Biography--20th century.

Biography.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xlii, 483 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

Third edition.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2014.

Summary:

In this collection of remarkable biographical portraits, the great essayist and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin brings to life a wide range of prominent twentieth-century thinkers, politicians, and writers. These include Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova. With the exception of Roosevelt, Berlin met them all, and he knew many of them well. Other figures recalled here include the Zionist Yitzhak Sadeh, the U.S. Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter, the classicist and wit Maurice Bowra, the philosopher J. L. Austin, and the literary critic Edmund Wilson. For this 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

Winston Churchill in 1940 1

Hubert Henderson at All Souls 30

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt 37

Richard Pares 50

Chaitn Weizmann 57

Felix Frankfurter at Oxford 97

Aldous Huxley 108

L. B. Namier 121

Maurice Bowra 148

J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy 156

John Petrov Plamenatz 177

Auberon Herbert 187

Einstein and Israel 195

Where Was I? 211

Maynard and Lydia Keynes 218

Nahum Goldmann 225

Memories of Brief Meetings with Ben-Gurion 235

Martin Cooper 243

Yitzhak Sadeh 252

Adam von Trott 269

David Cecil 273

Edmund Wilson at Oxford 283

Memories of Virginia Woolf 298

Alexander and Salome Halpern 304

Jewish Oxford 323

Herbert Hart 330

Corpuscle 337

Stephen Spender 347

Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956 356.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780691157702

0691157707

OCLC:

874118560