Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse.

The son of a Riga timber merchant and the first Jew elected to a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford, he was a historian of Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defender of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny.

In this definitive biography, a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject, Michael Ignatieff charts the emergence of a unique liberal temperament-serene, comic, secular, and unafraid-while examining its influence on Berlin''s vision of liberalism, which stressed the often tragic nature of political and moral choice.

A masterful work, illuminating, and beautifully written, Isaiah Berlin: A Life is destined to take its place among the great modern biographies.

"Michael Ignatieff has written a brilliant, tender, and insightful biography of this complex, important, and influential thinker."-The Globe and Mail

Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse.

The son of a Riga timber merchant and the first Jew elected to a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford, he was a historian of Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defender of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny.

In this definitive biography, a remarkable ten-year collaboration between biographer and subject, Michael Ignatieff charts the emergence of a unique liberal temperament-serene, comic, secular, and unafraid-while examining its influence on Berlin's vision of liberalism, which stressed the often tragic nature of political and moral choice.

A masterful work, illuminating, and beautifully written, Isaiah Berlin: A Life is destined to take its place among the great modern biographies.

"Michael Ignatieff has written a brilliant, tender, and insightful biography of this complex, important, and influential thinker."-The Globe and Mail

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is a distinguished author of both fiction and non-fiction. His novel Scar Tissue was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while The Russian Album, a family memoir, won the Governor General's Award and the Heinemann Prize from Britain's Royal Society of Literature. His work on ethnic nationalism in the 1990s resulted in a television series and the book Blood and Belonging, which won the Lionel Gelber Prize. Until August 2005, he was Carr Professor of the Practice of Human Rights and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.