Isaiah Berlin - Personal impressions

P ERSONAL I MPRESSIONS

I SAIAH B ERLIN WAS BORN IN R IGA, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both Revolutions Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents came to England, and he was educated at St Pauls School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory, and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. In addition to Personal Impressions, his main published works are Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlins Literary Trustees. He has edited (or co-edited) many other books by Berlin, including the first three of four volumes of his letters, and is currently working on the remaining volume with Mark Pottle.

Hermione Lee is President of Wolfson College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson, and Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford. Her books include biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and, most recently, Penelope Fitzgerald.

The career of Lord Annan (19162000) reflects a lifelong dedication to education and the arts. He was Provost of Kings College, Cambridge, Provost of University College London and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London. He was also Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, a Trustee of the British Museum, and a Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. His books include Leslie Stephen, Our Age and The Dons.

For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit
http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/

ALSO BY ISAIAH BERLIN

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Karl Marx

The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Age of Enlightenment

Russian Thinkers

Concepts and Categories

Against the Current

The Crooked Timber of Humanity

The Sense of Reality

The Proper Study of Mankind

The Roots of Romanticism

The Power of Ideas

Three Critics of the Enlightenment

Freedom and Its Betrayal

Liberty

The Soviet Mind

Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

with Beata Polanowska-Sygulska

Unfinished Dialogue

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Flourishing: Letters 19281946

Enlightening: Letters 19461960

Building: Letters 19601975

PERSONAL IMPRESSIONS

ISAIAH BERLIN

Edited by Henry Hardy

Afterword by Noel Annan

Third Edition

Foreword by Hermione Lee

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Published in the United States of America, its Colonies and Dependencies, the Philippine Islands and Canada by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

press.princeton.edu

First edition published by the Hogarth Press 1980 and by the Viking Press 1981

Second edition published by Pimlico and Princeton University Press 1998

Third edition published by Princeton University Press 2014

Copyright Isaiah Berlin 1949, 1953, 1955

Isaiah Berlin 1958, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995

The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2014

This selection and editorial matter Henry Hardy 1980, 1998, 2014

Foreword Princeton University Press 2014

Afterword Noel Annan 1980, 1998

The moral right of Isaiah Berlin and Henry Hardy to be identified as the author and editor respectively of this work has been asserted

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-15770-2

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro

Printed on acid-free paper

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To the memory of
Geoffrey Wilkinson
19211996

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Photo credits: 1, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, Getty Images (1, Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone; 3, Keystone/Hulton Archive; 5, Bernard Hoffman/Time and Life Pictures; 8, Ron Case, Hulton Archive; 9, John Chillingworth/Picture Post; 10, George Douglas/Picture Post; 13, Hulton Archive); 2, 4, courtesy of The Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford; 6, George Tames/New York Times; 7, courtesy of Chatto and Windus; 11, courtesy of The Warden and Fellows of Nuffield College, Oxford; 12, Mrs E. Grant; 14, 32, 38, 40, 43, courtesy of The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust (IBLT); 15, Walter Sanders, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images; 16, Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images; 17, courtesy of Aline Berlin; 18, Benedict Cooper; 19, courtesy of Yoram Sadeh; 20, Jewish National Fund; 21, courtesy of Verena Onken von Trott; 22, Norman Parkinson Ltd/courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive; 23, Sylvia Salmi (print supplied by Farrar, Straus and Giroux); 24, Ian Parsons; 259, courtesy of Tatiana Wolff; 30, Raphael Loewe Personal Archive (AHerbert 1.16), Leopold Muller Memorial Library, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, 2014; 31, courtesy of Brasenose College; 33, Humphrey Spender; 34, IBLT/Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Berlin 754, fols 18v20 (scan The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2004); 35, V. Slavinsky (scan The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2014); 36, IBLT/Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Berlin 8, fol. 9 (scan Bodleian Library 2014); 37, IBLT/Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Berlin 784, fol. 1 (scan The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust 2004); 39, IBLT/Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Berlin 784, fol. 12 (scan Bodleian Library 2014); 41, courtesy of Oxford Mail/The Oxford Times (Newsquest Oxfordshire); 42, courtesy of Anna Akhmatova Museum, Fountain House, St Petersburg (gift of Aline Berlin).

FOREWORD

Hermione Lee

I SAIAH B ERLIN WAS A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER, a historian of ideas and, in his own way, a biographer, a narrator of lives. He believed in genius and in the power of individuals to change and influence history. He wanted to understand and describe how exceptional people behaved, thought and affected the world. He was fascinated by charisma and intellectual energy. He was intensely curious, gregarious and observant. He relished personal anecdotes, the more idiosyncratic the better. One of his favourite quotations, from Kant, was Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

The pleasure he took in knowing remarkable individuals has often been noticed. His friend the philosopher Alan Montefiore said of him: He enjoyed the peculiarities of people who were, not necessarily larger than life, [] but people who in some way or another stood out. He had a great taste for eccentricities. In his letters, and in his much reported, legendary conversational flow, this fascination could come across just as gossip though gossip is an art, too, of which he was a very skilled practitioner. In these published pieces, some written to order for memorials and obsequies, some written long after the encounters they describe, there is a more serious, public and lasting intention. In essence what this book does is to play variations on the theme of moral virtue.