ISAIAH BERLIN WAS BORN IN RIGA, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both Revolutions – Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents came to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory, and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. In addition to Personal Impressions, his main published works are Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 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.
Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s Literary Trustees. He has edited (or co-edited) many other books by Berlin, including the first three of four volumes of his letters, and is currently working on the remaining volume with Mark Pottle.
Hermione Lee is President of Wolfson College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson, and Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford. Her books include biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and, most recently, Penelope Fitzgerald.
The career of Lord Annan (1916–2000) reflects a lifelong dedication to education and the arts. He was Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, Provost of University College London and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London. He was also Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery, a Trustee of the British Museum, and a Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. His books include Leslie Stephen, Our Age and The Dons.
For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit
‹http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/›