Personal Impressions

Updated Edition

Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400851683
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In this collection of remarkable biographical portraits, the great essayist and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin brings to life a wide range of prominent twentieth-century thinkers, politicians, and writers. These include Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova. With the exception of Roosevelt, Berlin met them all, and he knew many of them well. Other figures recalled here include the Zionist Yitzhak Sadeh, the U.S. Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter, the classicist and wit Maurice Bowra, the philosopher J. L. Austin, and the literary critic Edmund Wilson. For this edition, ten new pieces have been added, including portraits of David Ben-Gurion, Maynard and Lydia Keynes, and Stephen Spender, as well as Berlin's autobiographical reflections on Jewish Oxford and his Oxford undergraduate years. Rich and enlightening, Personal Impressions is a vibrant demonstration of Berlin's belief that ideas truly live only through people.

INDEX

Douglas Matthews

References in italics are to the essays that comprise the main treatment of the subject in question

Abakumov, Viktor Semenovich, 392

Abraham, Gerald Ernest Heal, 249

Abramovich, Rafail (né Rein), 311

Abyssinia, 89

Acmeists, 387, 410

Acton, Harold Mario Mitchell, 347

Adamovic, Georgy Viktorovich, 404

Adams, William George Stewart, 271

Adenauer, Konrad Hermann Joseph, 227

Adler, Sol(omon), 326

Afinogenova, Evgeniya Bernardovna (‘Jenny Marling’; née Schwartz), 372, 374, 400

Ahad Ha’am (pen name of Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg), 202, 233

Aiken, Conrad Potter, 291

Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna (pseudonym of Anna Andreevna Gorenko): greatness, xvi, 387; IB meets in Leningrad (1945), xxi–xxix, xxxvi–xxxvii, 398, 400–13, 416, 419; condemned and harassed by Soviet authorities, xxii, 408, 417–18, 423–4; in Oxford for Honorary Degree (1965), xxvii, xxxii, 397, 413, 417, 420, 422; on memory, 256; friendship with Salome Halpern, 306–7, 318, 321; war poems, 361; pictured, 362, 414, 418, 422, 425; popularity, 362, 426; poetry readings, 363; on Hemingway, 379; admires Kafka, 385, 409; and Jewish friends, 387; visits Pasternak, 391–2; disparages Chekhov, 397, 408; on Pasternak, 410, 421–3; patriotism, 410, 419; love of music, 411; friendships, 412; translating, 412, 417, 423; publication of works, 413–15; IB telephones during 1956 visit, 416–17; believes meeting with IB responsible for Cold War, 419 & n, 426; receives Taormina Literary Prize in Italy, 419; on Russian poets and poetry, 420–3; on own status as poet, 421; sense of mortality, 423; dogmatism and idées fixes, 425–6; believes Stalin orders poisoning, 426; heroism, 426; works, 430–1; Anno Domini, 405; Cinque, xxvi, xxviii; From Six Books, 406, 429; Poem without a Hero, xxiii–xxiv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Author’s Preface to the First Edition
• Editor’s Preface
• Winston Churchill in 1940
• Hubert Henderson at All Souls
• President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
• Richard Pares
• Chaim Weizmann
• Felix Frankfurter at Oxford
• Aldous Huxley
• L. B. Namier
• Maurice Bowra
• J. L. Austin and the Early Beginnings of Oxford Philosophy
• John Petrov Plamenatz
• Auberon Herbert
• Einstein and Israel
• Where Was I?
• Maynard and Lydia Keynes
• Nahum Goldmann
• Memories of Brief Meetings with Ben-Gurion
• Martin Cooper
• Yitzhak Sadeh
• Adam von Trott
• David Cecil
• Edmund Wilson at Oxford
• Memories of Virginia Woolf
• Alexander and Salome Halpern
• Jewish Oxford
• Herbert Hart
• Corpuscle
• Stephen Spender
• Meetings with Russian Writers in 1945 and 1956
• Epilogue: The Three Strands in My Life
• Afterword
• Index