The most recommended Isaiah Berlin books

This is the book for readers who wish to sample Berlin’s kaleidoscopic, multidisciplinary work in a single volume across its whole range. It includes his most celebrated essays in philosophy, political theory, the history of ideas, and twentieth-century portraiture. His two most famous pieces, The Hedgehog and the Fox (on Tolstoy’s view of history) and Two Concepts of Liberty (on ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ political freedom), are here, as are his accounts of his formative meetings with the great Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, his impressions of Churchill and Roosevelt, and his pellucid accounts of romanticism and nationalism. The essays are linked by his ruling preoccupation with understanding human nature in all its irreducibly various guises: what he called, following Kant, ‘the crooked timber of humanity’.

Almost every one of the hundreds of books I’ve read in the last few years was published in 1925, and The Polyglots was among the most fascinating.

Gerhardie is rarely read now—although republished by NYRB Classics—but at the time, he was widely hailed as a genius: Graham Greene, Isaiah Berlin, and Evelyn Waugh are said to have spent their college days walking around with copies of his books; Greene said Gerhardie was “the most important new novelist to appear in our young life.”

The Polyglots has a Rabelaisian level of goofy mayhem and a Tristram Shandy-like wry understatement, with large ladlefuls of Kafka and Wodehouse. The blasé, amoral hero wanders from Russia’s far east and then onto Harbin, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Cairo, and elsewhere in a rambunctious picaresque journey peopled with eccentrics of every stripe.

As he wrote to his publisher in 1931, when his star was already fading,… show more.

This is fun to read.

Kedourie passionately hates nationalism, which he sees as an irrational millenarian movement born of Enlightenment intellectuals who debunk religion and tradition. He disparages it as a "children’s crusade" on the part of a new group of educated young excluded from power that they see as their right. They promise that the overthrow of the existing order will deliver liberation and earthly salvation but this produces only revolution, war, and tyranny.

It is vividly written, with brilliant characterisations of individual nationalists. This unbalanced critique proposes that wrong ideas, such as national self-determination, have disastrous consequences. But it contains important insights into the "dark side" of nationalism.

As a Russian Jew and Russian-speaker by birth, a witness of the Russian Revolution, a historian of ideas by vocation, and a consummate prose-writer, Berlin was able to extract the pith of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and present it in English as no one else has before or since. Belinsky, Herzen, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and others come to life in these ten essays and speak to us and our concerns today in Berlin’s ventriloquistic tours de force.

In particular, Herzen’s passionate denunciation of political extremism plays a central role, and provides a moral underpinning for Berlin’s commitment to liberty. The book is a major contribution to the explanation of Russia to the West, and the reader is left in no doubt about the relevance and power of the ideas that Berlin illuminates.

George Weidenfeld was a giant of the publishing world in the second half of the twentieth century. 

Harding tells Weidenfeld’s story, from birth in Vienna in 1919 to death in London in 2016, through the lens of 19 of the books that Weidenfeld brought (or didn’t bring) into being throughout his career. As a device for a biography, this is sheer genius. 

By telling the story of Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, Watson’s The Double Helix and the book that never was – Mick Jagger’s autobiography – and many others, Thomas Harding reveals the controversies, scandals, elite parties, and political handshakes that Weidenfeld, a refugee from Nazi Austria in August 1938, attracted throughout his life. 

My evening hour of reading turned into two, three, or four hours, as I needed to know what came next. 

Ignatieff’s intensely readable authorised biography of Berlin is based on a decade of recorded conversations with his subject about all aspects of his life, as well as on a study of the massive archive of letters and other papers that Berlin left at his death. As a result it has many of the characteristics of the autobiography that Berlin never wrote, but one filtered through Ignatieff’s shrewd critical intelligence, deployed in the service of the liberal humanist outlook that he shares with his subject.

Though he declines to define it, Berlin says “The importance of romanticism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world.” In this brief set of lectures he dwells mainly on German writers, since Germany was arguably the homeland of romanticism. Berlin seems to know everything, but his erudition does not interfere with his lively style. What the book lacks in thoroughness it more than makes up with sharp and provocative ideas.

John Gray’s encounter with Berlin’s ideas, first published in Berlin’s lifetime, remains one of the most intriguing and challenging explorations of the intellectual territories that he inhabited. Gray is not afraid to disagree with Berlin, but makes clear where he goes beyond him to present his own interpretation of the topics by which they are both preoccupied: freedom, pluralism, history, nationalism, Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and liberalism.

I mention this book as a way to listen to some old hour-long video talks by the sage Isaiah Berlin. He did, in fact, hate to write, but he loved talking. After reading any of his several essays, go right to the meat. Which will give the political, philosophical How-to Guide to leading a Nazi, Marxist or Terrorist revolution. I give talks and podcasts on the biological psychiatry of such evils and he is my go-to guy.