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The Sense of Reality. Studies in Ideas and Their History
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The Sense of Reality. Studies in Ideas and Their History Paperback - 1998

by Berlin, Isaiah; edited by Henry Hardy; Introduction by Patrick Gardiner

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Berlin's "The Sense of Reality" made available, in the months before the author's death, an important body of previously unknown work by one of the century's leading historians of ideas, and one of the finest essayists writing in English.

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New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux. New. 1998. Paperback. 0374525692 .*** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request *** – – *** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT - FLAWLESS COPY, BRAND NEW, PRISTINE, NEVER OPENED -- - 278 pages. -- with a bonus offer-- .
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First line

WHEN MEN, as occasionally happens, develop a distaste for the age in which they live, and love and admire some past period with such uncritical devotion that it is clear that, if they had their choice, they would wish to be alive then and not now - and when, as the next step, they seek to introduce into their lives certain of the habits and practices of the idealised past, and criticise the present for falling short of, or for degeneration from, this past - we tend to accuse them of nostalgic 'escapism', romantic antiquarianism, lack of realism; we dismiss their efforts as attempts to 'turn the clock back', to 'ignore the forces of history', or 'fly in the face of the facts', at best touching and childish and pathetic, at worst 'retrograde', or 'obstructive', or insanely 'fanatical', and, although doomed to failure in the end, capable of creating gratuitous obstacles to progress in the immediate present and future.

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Citations

  • New York Times, 02/07/1999, Page 24

About the author

Sir Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909 and immigrated to England in 1921. Berlin's achievement as a historian and exponent of ideas earned him the Erasmus, Lippincott, and Agnelli Prizes. He also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defense of civil liberties. A Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he was the author of ten other books. Sir Isaiah died in Oxford in November 1997.