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by Isaiah Berlin

Princeton University Press

Due/Published April 2001, 328 pages, paper

ISBN 0691088586

New in paper (S01)

This collection contains Isaiah Berlin's appreciations of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the intellectual or political world, sometimes both. The names of many of them are familiar: Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, and others. With the exception of Roosevelt, he met them all and knew many of them well. For this expanded edition, four new portraits have been added, including those of Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson. This volume also contains an account of Berlin's meetings in Russia with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. In the epilogue, Berlin describes the three strands in his own personality: Russian, English, and Jewish.