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 his family 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 Against the Current, his main published works are Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, 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 volumes of his letters, and is currently working on the remaining volume.
Roger Hausheer has taught at Oxford, Giessen and Bradford Universities, among others, and is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Montenegro at Podgorica. He is working on an intellectual biography of Isaiah Berlin, and a study of the German Idealist philosophers Fichte and Schelling.
Mark Lilla, Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, co-edited The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin (2001). His latest book is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (2007).
For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit
<http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/>