Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2004

Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946. Isaiah Berlin. Henry Hardy, editor. Chatto & Windus. [pounds sterling]30.00. xxxv 755 pages. ISBN 0-701-17420-X. This is the fifteenth volume of works by Sir Isaiah Berlin to have been edited by Henry Hardy, one of the late Sir Isaiah's literary trustees. Berlin was one of the towering intellectual figures of twentieth-century British life and this collection of his letters, which begins when he was a schoolboy at London's St Paul's School, ends with his 1946 return to Oxford from war work in America.

The editor has devoted fourteen years of work to collecting the letters and this is the first of a projected three-volume collection. Berlin corresponded with a vast range of people including many if not most of the great intellectual, artistic and political figures of the century: T. S. Eliot, Dame Margot Fonteyn de Arias, Bertrand Russell, the Prince of Wales, Stuart Hampshire, Yehudi Menuhin, to mention but a few. His interests ranged widely and he was a good letter writer because he was a good observer of mankind: 'the vein of social comedy ... runs through the letters'. The editor has included a short 'personal impression' of Berlin, copious footnotes, relevant appendices and a 'select biographical glossary' of people involved in Berlin's life. The joy of the book, however, remains with the letters themselves and the worlds they bring back to life.