Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946 and
The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism


UK edition
US edition
‘I find Isaiah Berlin’s letters fascinating and cannot bear to put the book down. What a brilliant correspondent he was! And how superbly annotated and edited the book is!’
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr
‘Isaiah Berlin was a man of great charm, intelligence, curiosity and distinction.’
Allan Massie, Literary Review
‘The flow of conversation is magically preserved here; but so is the intellectual substance’
Roy Foster, Financial Times
‘[An] unstoppably clever, perceptive, serio-comic epistolary style … a great letter-writer’
Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph
‘[H]e brought … a clear-eyed, unintimidated defence of liberty, expressed in prose that spread this thinking to every university, decent bookshop and school in the West … if that is not a great achievement, it is hard to know what might be.’
Andrew Marr, Daily Telegraph
‘It tells the entrancing story of a brilliant man waking up to the world’
Derwent May, The Times
‘The letters in this book, magnificently edited by Henry Hardy … bring back an echo of [Berlin’s] life-enhancing conversation … Isaiah’s goodness suffuses these letters.’
Raymond Carr, Spectator
‘Berlin’s correspondence has the wit and flow that friends prized in his conversation … It gives us the inimitable voice of a generous, magnanimous intellect’
Edmund Fawcett, New Statesman
‘the story is exciting … many readers will surely sign up for more’
Richard D. North, Independent
‘full of insights about everyone and everything. He was an alpha-level gossip, the genius kind … a conversation of wit and substance that you never want to end’
Michael Pye, Scotsman
‘I always regarded Isaiah, with whom I had fairly close relations during my several periods of residence in Oxford, not only as the outstanding and leading critical intelligence of his time, but as something like a patron saint among the commentators on the Russian scene, and particularly the literary and political scene.’
George Kennan, quoted in Strobe Talbott’s Foreword
‘While Berlin was alive, he was somewhat of a supreme authority in the West as far as Russian culture was concerned. At present, there are many excellent specialists to be found in the Western world, but it is difficult to think of a figure of similar intellectual curiosity, wide knowledge and sure judgment who is equally at home in the cultural traditions of several major countries.’
Walter Laqueur, Moscow Times
‘The author’s sincerity wins one over.’
Andrey Ostal´sky, BBC Russian Service website
‘This remarkable volume is superb. Berlin’s great powers of observation combine with his great knowledge and literary gifts to provide us with a fascinating series of insights. Some of his experiences were unique. Even a reader who is only casually interested in the history of Russia will be fascinated. Every day the media present us with lumps of coal, and to find a real diamond is a delight.’
Geoffrey Riklin, IntellectualConservative.com
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