Personal Impressions

This is more than a collection of brilliantly perceptive portraits from the life of men as various as Churchill, Namier, Einstein, Pasternak. It is also a window into one of the wisest, most spacious and generous minds of our time * Observer *
This is an amazingly enjoyable book from a very gifted and fortunate man -- Christopher Hitchens * New Statesman *
Marvellously good reading... A quarter of the entire volume is occupied by [an] essay in which Berlin recalls his meetings with Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956. This last essay, in particular, is simply stunning -- Alan Ryan * Sunday Times *
Welcoming and rewarding… This splendid book bring[s] the past to life. It lives for Berlin, and, thanks to him, it lives for us -- Peter Stansky * New York Times Book Review *
It is one of Berlin's most endearing characteristics that he can admire so many utterly diverse people, that he can tell us about them all, and see the point of them’ -- Mary Warnock * Listener *
It is hard to think of any other writer who is so penetrating, so amusing, and yet so entirely free of malice… No one, I believe, who reads his books could fail to recognise that they are in the presence of someone who is not only hugely gifted intellectually, but who is also the most sympathetic, ebullient ,and generous man whom they arc ever likely to encounter -- Anthony Storr * Spectator *
An invigorating spectacle of the liberal mind at its most assured and unobstructed, glorying in the variety of human character and achievement which it is the chief purpose of liberalism to applaud and protect -- Anthony Quinton * Encounter *
Among men of learning in history and philosophy Isaiah Berlin is probably the most captivating expositor of ideas in the English-speaking world. The subject of Personal Impressions is men and women inhabited by intellects that blend with or distort their characters and become important personal visions… His writing has all the élan of conversation -- V. S. Pritchett * New York Review of Books *
A succession of portraits that in the end evokes the portrait of the author himself: a man of moral intuition and superb intelligence, of empathy and magnanimity, of unerring sharpness and style -- Fritz Stern * Foreign Affairs *