Building
Isaiah Berlin
In the period covered here (1960–75) Isaiah Berlin creates Wolfson College, Oxford; John F. Kennedy becomes US President (and is assassinated); Berlin dines with JFK on the day he is told of the Soviet missile bases in Cuba; the Six-Day Arab–Israeli war of 1967 creates problems that are still with us today; Richard M. Nixon succeeds Johnson as US President and resigns over Watergate; and the long agony of the Vietnam War grinds on in the background.
At the same time Berlin publishes some of his most important work, including Four Essays on Liberty – the key texts of his liberal pluralism – and the essays later included in Vico and Herder. He talks on the radio, appears on television and in documentary films and gives numerous lectures, especially his celebrated Mellon Lectures, later published as The Roots of Romanticism.
Behind these public events is a constant stream of gossip and commentary, acerbic humour and warm personal feeling. Berlin writes about an enormous range of topics to a sometimes dazzling cast of correspondents. This new volume leaves no doubt that Berlin is one of the very best letter-writers of the twentieth century.
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About Isaiah Berlin
Reviews for Building
John Banville
New York Review of Books
Berlin was sui generis. There never was anyone like him before, and there probably will not be anyone like him again... He was, above all, a genuine
as opposed to a stage
liberal, who believed people were entitled to their beliefs and even to their prejudices, and both could be accommodated
DJ Taylor
Independent on Sunday
Consistently interesting and at times strikingly unexpected, these letters show sides of Berlin that have not been seen before
John Gray
Literary Review
Berlin's achievement was immense, in making ideas entertaining in a culture generally averse to them... One way to read [him] today is to relish the passionate man between the high-flown lines
Lesley Chamberlain
Independent
There are many wonderful sketches. Of, for example, President Kennedy... or Roy Jenkins... and there are damning judgments of many great and good... Dip in and savour a lost world.... For reasons of technology (email and text) and also of intellectual culture the letters of today's Berlins... will simply not exist for future historians
David Goodhart
Sunday Times (Culture)