Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Isaiah Berlin: A Life is a biography of the twentieth-century British philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin by the Canadian political thinker and writer Michael Ignatieff (also rendered in Chinese as Ye Liting). Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909, moved with his family to Britain in 1920, and thereafter studied and taught at Oxford for many years. He served as the first president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and as president of the British Academy, and died in 1997. He rarely wrote systematic, bulky volumes; instead, through essays and lectures such as The Hedgehog and the Fox, Two Concepts of Liberty, and Russian Thinkers, he clarified core questions of modern political thought, including liberty, pluralism, and historical determinism. The book is not based on an accumulation of documents: for ten years beginning in 1987, Ignatieff visited Berlin regularly and reviewed his life with him. The biography unfolds chronologically, from childhood in Riga and Petrograd, through study in London and Oxford, service in New York and Washington during World War II, a visit to the Soviet Union in 1945, and intellectual activity during the Cold War, all the way to his later years under great fame. The book presents a living Berlin: his insecurities and vanity, his outstanding conversational ability and enthusiasm for friendship, his obsession with music, and his interactions and entanglements with contemporaries such as Akhmatova, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Eliot, and Arendt. The author is also the biographer Berlin himself approved; he interweaves Berlin's life experiences and intellectual changes, sketching a group portrait of twentieth-century intellectuals.