Corrections to the second edition of Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life

As the first biographer who used the Isaiah Berlin Papers, before they were deposited in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (where they were then catalogued and foliated), and before the four-volume edition of Berlin’s letters (2004–15) had appeared, Michael Ignatieff did not have ready access to all the sources that he would have been able to use had he been starting afresh once this process had been completed; he was also under pressure to complete his task within a short time after Berlin’s death on 5 November 1997. The first edition of his biography (1998) was therefore considerably revised for its second, updated edition, published twenty-five years later (2023).

In order that students of Berlin should not be misled or travel up blind alleys in the years intervening between the two editions, a web page was established to list selected corrections of, or additions to, the first edition. Much of this list is preserved here, for the benefit of those still using the first edition.

The second edition incorporated all the information provided on that web page, adding references to the Isaiah Berlin Papers and the published letters, as well as to other publications that appeared after the first edition went to press. Errors in the second edition that have come to the webmaster’s attention appear in the ongoing list below. If anyone can provide a source for any of the untraced quotations (some of which may come from untranscribed conversations), the webmaster will be grateful to be notified.

Corrections

*Page*	*Line/note/entry*	*For*	*Read*
78	14 up	Mr.	M.
83	3 up	Moore Crosthwaite	Con O’Neill
96	14 up	World Order	World-Order
103	11–12	In the summer of 1937 Hampshire and Berlin travelled through Ireland together.	In the summer of 1936 Hampshire and Berlin travelled through Ireland with Con O’Neill.
110	3	MI5	MI6
112	3 up	Russian	Soviet
181	8 up	than she	than her
227	2	Felix Frankfurter,	a friend in the US,
238	18	eastern	western
240	2 up	six	five
241	14	theatre	theater
260	10	Gunzburg	de Gunzburg
266	5 up	‘Il	‘Mais il
294	13	The next morning,	A week later,
349	10–9 up	seemed doomed to them …	seem doomed to them […]
353	2	moi,	moi
368	10	Ralph	Ralf
373	after 2	[insert new entry]	A+ Online supplement to A, bit.ly/A-supp
	before 6	[insert new entries]	PIRA Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought, ed. Henry Hardy, introduction by Joshua L. Cherniss (London/Princeton, 2006), 2nd. ed., foreword by William A. Galston (Princeton, 2014) POI The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London/Princeton, 2000), 2nd. ed., foreword by Avishai Margalit (Princeton, 2013)
374	before 9	[insert new entry]	IB/IV IB interviewed by
	before 6	[insert new entry]	MI/IV Michael Ignatieff interview with
375	ch. 1, note 1	See ch. 8.	See 127–9.
	ch. 2, note 1, 4	See also	See also his
383	note 25	Untraced.	Untraced, but ascribed to the fictional Elya Mendel (based on IB) in Justin Cartwright, The Song Before It is Sung (London, 2007), 216, 127; and cf. ibid. 227.
	note 44	Untraced.	Untraced, but at Tape B4: 7 Hampshire says, ‘I am and was almost comically British, I mean to a ludicrous degree’; cf. IB to Bowra, 18 November 1965, ‘No more English Englishman has ever been created’ (B 370).
385	note 12	337	F 337
387	note 28	Tape 18: 23;	Tape 18: 9–11;
389	note 1	76	80
393	note 56	77/122.	77 (Russian version), 122 (German version).
394	note 7	Tape 12	Tape 20
398	note 21, 1	154/182	MSB 154/182
399	note 36, 2	39	29
402	note 25	Tape B1: 27.	Aline Berlin.
409	1	3.3.60	4.3.60
	2	Le Rhinocéros.	Le Rhinocéros, 144c. [roman comma]
410	note 6	MI/IV	IB/IV
		Hoffenberg	Hoffenberg (President of Wolfson, 1985–93)
415	note 43	Shielka	Shiela
428	Lewis, C. I.	World Order	World-Order
435	Gunzburg	Horace	Horace de

Corrections to the second edition of Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Corrections

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