Flourishing is the first volume of a keenly awaited edition of the marvellously readable and entertaining letters of the most famous English intellectual of the last century.

“Life is not worth living unless one can be indiscreet to intimate friends,” wrote Isaiah Berlin to a correspondent. Flourishing inaugurates a keenly awaited edition of Berlin’s letters that might well adopt this remark as an epigraph. Isaiah Berlin’s life was enormously worth living, both for himself and for us; and fortunately he said a great deal to his friends on paper as well as in person. The indiscretions, though engaging, are of course only part of the story. Berlin is one of the best modern exponents of the disappearing art of letter-writing.

During the two decades covered here we see his personality and career growing and blooming. In America he writes a regular telegram to his anxious parents, often saying just “flourishing.” The word is entirely apt, not only for his wartime experience, but for the whole of his early life, vividly displayed in this book in all its multi-faceted delightfulness.