Carey John. Times June 7, 2009:Isaiah Berlin used to say that people were his landscape. In the first volume of his letters, Flourishing, edited by Henry Hardy and covering the years 1928 to 1946, he went so far as to declare a positive dislike of nature, suggesting that love of sublime landscapes was linked with reactionary romanticism. It is true that his focus was always on human beings, and this second volume shows him finding fulfilment among them as never before. Returning from war work in the British embassy in Washington, becoming once again and then ceasing to be a bachelor don, taking up the history of ideas and achieving, through a series of radio talks, a degree of celebrity about which he was highly ambivalent, immersing himself in the internecine struggles of All Souls and Oxford, giving advice to heads of state and officials running government agencies - these and other aspects of Berlin's life are vividly captured in this absorbingly readable second selection. There could hardly be a more intimate portrait of Berlin than that which emerges from these letters. But the man himself is not so easily captured, and sometimes appears quite different from the one who seemed always to feel at home in the world. (http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/gray_06_09.html)
Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was a distinguished Oxford historian of ideas who memorably classified the world’s thinkers (borrowing his terms from an ancient Greek poet) as either “hedgehogs” who “know one big thing” (like Plato or Nietzsche) or “foxes” who “know many things” (like Shakespeare or Montaigne). He seems himself to have been a fox who would have quite liked to be a hedgehog, but was too afflicted by self-doubt, and too fond of dinner parties and country-house weekends, to muster the requisite single-mindedness. Colleagues felt he did not publish enough, but since 1978 Henry Hardy, with occasional co-editors, has devoted himself to gathering up and printing, as far as possible, every word Berlin wrote. So far 15 volumes have appeared, including one of early letters. The whole project is clearly an act of homage, even of worship, but the present volume will not, I think, enhance Berlin’s reputation as much as the editors might wish, mainly because it comes close to being unreadable. (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6430260.ece)
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