'Isaiah Berlin is often quoted and referenced in articles and other material around the web.
It was an accidental discovery that had a profound influence on Berlin's life and thought.
He never produced a monolithic "great work", and he scattered his writing and thoughts generously and widely — not only in his essays and lectures and journalism, but also in his letters, which are still in the process of being published, and which reveal him to have been as brilliant in correspondence as he was in conversation. […] Verdi’s genius is capable of a deep moral and political grasp of reality, a degree of universal understanding which for me, at least, is without parallel. The United States: New York, Washington & the East Coast the human cost of the Soviet suppression of freedom of expression. Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin is credited with being the first to popularize a substantial work describing the theory of objective value-pluralism, bringing it to the attention of academia (cf. Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was an Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas who made a key contribution to the development of political theory with his essay 'Two Concepts of Liberty' (1958). What more can I say?’ (to the Royal Opera House, 11 December 1995)'I have listened to more soloists, chamber music, opera, symphonies, choral works than almost, I think, anyone living' (to Michael Ignatieff, 10 January 1997)'I have listened to more soloists, chamber music, opera, symphonies, choral works than almost, I think, anyone living' (to Michael Ignatieff, 10 January 1997)‘I’ve just read about Akhmatova’s life, a memoir, a very sensitive & distinguished woman’s reminiscences of her: it is solemn, terribly sad, tragic & full of deaths & – round the nearest corner – torture and executions – & moving as Solzhenitsyn – who is IB visited Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad in November 1945: 'The fact that I was probably the first foreigner to visit her after more than a quarter of a century did affect her greatly, and in this way I earned an undeserved immortality in her verse' (to Gleb Struve, 19 July 1971).
the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library). My ideas are shaped by the English-speaking and Scandinavian worlds’ (to Signora Merlo, 9 April 1991)'American solitude […] induces, at least in me, first a sense of extreme gloom and sense of appalling isolation which undermines all endeavour and causes one to feel that one will never see the familiar world again: […] the reason for never even contemplating the idea of settling in the United States is that such pockets of solitude are built into the very atmosphere itself – human association, in spite of all the warmth and humanity and easiness and lack of strain of certain bits of America, is infinitely more difficult than it is in Europe, and the pauperisation – the process of giving out without taking in – is absolutely remorseless' (to (Stuart Hampshire, 9 October 1961).‘I am not in the United States at present, although I may be coming for about one week – in and out – to deliver a lecture in Urbana, Illinois, of all places, simply as an excuse for going to the United States – as you may imagine I long to do from time to time – it invigorates me as nothing does, no matter how dark the situation may seem' (to Aubrey Morgan, 4 February 1974)'Pasternak in his day scolded me for regarding everything truly Russian through enamoured eyes.
More famous still is his‘I am a Zionist, if only because I believe that neither the Jews nor anyone else should be condemned to be a minority everywhere, for that distorts human development, both of individuals and of peoples.
His father and grandfather ran a large timber business in Latvia, and were prominent in the Jewish community. © SOROS FOUNDATION – LATVIA . Liberty is a revised and expanded edition of the book that Isaiah Berlin regarded as his most important--Four Essays on Liberty, a standard text of liberalism, constantly in demand and constantly discussed since it was first published in 1969.