Isaiah Berlin
ENLIGHTENING LETTERS 1946-60
Edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes. Trafalgar Square. 845pp. $50. Illustrated.
By Martin Rubin, The Washington Times, Feb. 26, 2010
More than a decade since Sir Isaiah Berlin died aged 88 in Oxford, loaded with honors and distinctions academic and other, debate still rages in intellectual circles as to just where he stands as a thinker. Was he a brilliant and original contributor to the field of political philosophy or a mere synthesizer of what he had gleaned from recondite figures in past centuries? . . .
In this new volume of letters, superbly edited and annotated, readers have an extraordinary opportunity to taste just what that conversation was like, thanks to Berlin’s discovery of the dictaphone as a way of coping with the many demands on his time. Thus 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.
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