Volume 28, Number 1 · February 5, 1981
Semi-Heroes
By V.S. Pritchett
Personal Impressions
by Isaiah Berlin
Viking, 219 pp., $13.95
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. Berlin is an impressionist only in the sense that his impressions are argued and cut deep. He entices us to keep up with his fast conversation. As Noel Annan says in his long and searching introduction to this collection of Berlin's memoirs of such figures as Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, L.B. Namier, Felix Frankfurter, Maurice Bowra, Einstein, Aldous Huxley, the Oxford philosophers, and, in Russia, of Pasternak and Akhmatova:
Review, 3059 words
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