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Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960
854Overview
"People are my landscape," Isaiah Berlin liked to say, and nowhere is the truth of this observation more evident than in his letters. This second volume of Berlin’s letters takes up the story when, after war service in the U.S., he returns to life as an Oxford don. Against the background of post-war austerity, the letters chart years of academic frustration and self-doubt, the intellectual explosion when he moves from philosophy to the history of ideas, his growing national fame as broadcaster and lecturer, the publication of some of his best-known works, his election to a professorship, and his reaction to knighthood. Berlin’s visits to American universities, where he sees McCarthyism at work, and his journeys eastward—to Europe, Palestine (and later Israel), and the Soviet Union—inspire acute and often very funny portraits. These are the years, too, of momentous developments in his private life: the bachelor don’s loss of sexual innocence, the emotional turmoil of his father’s death, his courtship of a married woman, and his transformation into husband and stepfather.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781844138340 |
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Publisher: | Random House UK |
Publication date: | 07/01/2011 |
Pages: | 854 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.20(h) x 2.00(d) |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
"He was one of the greatest talkerslecturer, broadcaster, raconteurwho has ever lived. . . . Superbly edited and annotated . . . these extraordinary letters, transcribed with great difficulty and care, by those attuned in every sense to their author and accustomed to his ways, replicate to an extraordinary degree that torrential conversation with its preternatural mix of gossip, philosophy, and politics." Washington Times