"People are my landscape," Isaiah Berlin liked to say, and nowhere is the truth of this observation more evident than in his letters. This second volume of Berlin’s letters takes up the story when, after war service in the U.S., he returns to life as an Oxford don. Against the background of post-war austerity, the letters chart years of academic frustration and self-doubt, the intellectual explosion when he moves from philosophy to the history of ideas, his growing national fame as broadcaster and lecturer, the publication of some of his best-known works, his election to a professorship, and his reaction to knighthood. Berlin’s visits to American universities, where he sees McCarthyism at work, and his journeys eastward—to Europe, Palestine (and later Israel), and the Soviet Union—inspire acute and often very funny portraits. These are the years, too, of momentous developments in his private life: the bachelor don’s loss of sexual innocence, the emotional turmoil of his father’s death, his courtship of a married woman, and his transformation into husband and stepfather.

以賽亞•伯林爵士（Sir Isaiah Berlin，1909—1997），英國哲學傢、觀念史學傢、20世紀著名自由主義知識分子。生於俄國猶太傢庭，童年目睹俄國革命，1921年隨父母前往英國。1928年進入牛津大學攻讀哲學，1939年藉撰寫《卡爾•馬剋思》的契機轉嚮觀念史研究。1957年就職牛津大學社會與政治理論教授，發錶具有開創性的“兩種自由概念”演說，同年獲封爵士。參與創辦牛津大學沃爾夫森學院並齣任首任院長。作為傑齣的觀念史學傢和學科主要奠基人，先後被授予耶路撒冷文學奬和伊拉斯謨奬。