Isaiah Berlin (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: John Gray
- First Published: 1995
- Type of Work: Biography; philosophy
- Time of Work: 1939-1995
- Setting: Latvia, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain
- Principal Characters: Isaiah Berlin
- Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Biography
- Subjects: Culture, Freedom, Philosophy or philosophers, Jews or Jewish life, Ethics, Soviet Union or Soviets, Great Britain, Rationalism
- Locales: United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, Latvia
Sir Isaiah Berlin, born in Riga in 1909, was in Petrograd in 1917 where, at the age of eight, he witnessed the first Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik coup later in the same year. In 1921 his parents moved to England. He had been brought up in Riga speaking Russian and German, and by the time he reached his teens as a schoolboy at St. Paul’s, he was not only trilingual but so polished in learning and language that his acceptance at Oxford was a foregone conclusion.
Except for the three years when he lived first in New York, then in Washington, D.C., working for the British...
[The entire page is 1702 words long]
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