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Personal Impressions Paperback – 5 Mar. 1998
There is a newer edition of this item:
For this new edition four new portraits have been added, including recollections of Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson. The volume ends with a vivid and moving account of Berlin's meetings in Russia with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPimlico
- Publication date5 Mar. 1998
- Dimensions15.19 x 2.59 x 23.8 cm
- ISBN-10071266601X
- ISBN-13978-0712666015
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"It is one of Berlin's most endearing characteristics that he can admire so many utterly diverse people, that he can tell us about them all, and see the point of them" (Mary Warnock Listener)
"This is a very moving and serious book, as well as a delightful one" (Richard Cobb Guardian)
"This splendid book brings the past to life. . . It bears the distinctive stamp of one of the great thinkers and writers of the age" (New York Review of Books)
"Simply stunning" (Alan Ryan Sunday Times)
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From the Publisher
About the Author
His published work includes Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, 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.
Product details
- Publisher : Pimlico (5 Mar. 1998)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 071266601X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0712666015
- Dimensions : 15.19 x 2.59 x 23.8 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 1,069,913 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 6,790 in Historical Biographies starting 1901
- 7,780 in Philosopher Biographies
- 9,365 in Political Biographies
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One has to approach his recollections in the right way, though.
As Noel Annan's intro says, he writes in long sentences, with sub-clauses within sub-clauses. There is total clarity, but only for the patient. Habitually, he builds up the opposite side of the coin in a long and complex paragraph before giving his own opinion. To appreciate--indeed even to read--the chapter on Austin in particular one must have already have read about him, and such related figures as Cook Wilson. In other words Berlin assumes you are broadly in the same intellectual league as he is.
Here and there I felt a bit frustrated. Berlin was of course a man of many connections, who had been born in St Petersburg, lived in
Latvia, educated at Oxford, and employed by HM Govt in the US and Russia. Yet SOME of his text does strike me as namedropping rather than analysis or explanation. Some of his face-to-face meetings, such as with Namier, Akmatatova and Pasternak, are of course significant, but he spent little enough time with political leaders, east or west--and there I would call his impressions just that--no more than impressions. Do not take this as a criticism of Berlin, who was far too important to be dismissed in areview of one book.
Just be aware that this book is not a terribly easy read UNLESS one is very well-informed already--and, maybe, used to IB's style.