I'm still a philosophy beginner(I've watched the good place but haven't read Kant), but I'm trying to get a grasp of the lives of the people who practice philosophy after learning of Jean-Paul Sartre's support towards many of the communist revolutions that western society seems to currently condemn. I'm aware that Henry Hardy is deeply entwined in publishing his work, and he's got something to do with how people deal with communism but that's about it. Any biographies that manage to tow the line(I know it's an eggcorn) between entertainment, education, and historiographical accuracy?
I had a soft spot for Berlin, when I was a student. You start the first sentence and you immediately feel welcomed into an intellectual club. I loved The Hedgehog and the Fox, immediately began splitting people I knew, especially artists, into the two categories. His Vico and Herder was a good intro to Vico. I learned that Vico is someone who is much easier to read about than to read- or, to be precise, the ideas he proposed have been expanded more clearly by others.
When I read the biography of Berlin by Michael Ignatieff years ago I didn't like him as much ( for this reason, I have avoided reading any biography of Richard Russ, AKA Patrick O'Brian). However, though the golden idol gets tarnished in it, it's a good biography. I mean, it's got plenty of places where you want to just shrug and skip past the academic political squabbles- but it tries to be thorough and is.
The late Christopher Hitchens wrote a review of it here for the London Review of Books, Moderation or Death (Vol. 20 No. 23, 26 November 1998). Like a lot of LRB reviews it is far more an article about something than a book critique. Hitchens' didn't often write kindly. He also disliked people playing safe, backing away from the inconvenient conclusions of their arguments, and you will get that here- as the mocking title indicates. He at least, like Ignatieff, admits Berlin was complicated.
Isaiah Berlin may have been designed, by origin and by temperament and by life experience, to become one of those witty and accomplished valets du pouvoir who adorn, and even raise the tone of, the better class of court. But there was something in him that recognised this as an ignoble and insufficient aspiration, and impelled him to resist it where he dared