Roots of Romanticism The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

"These are not only wonderfully engaging lectures, but by now also a historical document of considerable importance.... What was so good about the way Berlin tackled Romanticism was that he allowed for the variety of ideas and attitudes that so marked the movement, but found a common theme in the antitheses with which so much of his work was concerned--Romanticism as anti-rationalism, anti-monism, anti-utilitarianism, and so on. That enabled him to do something that few other writers have brought off, which was to set each strand of romanticism in its own cultural setting."--Alan Ryan, New College, University of Oxford "This book provides an excellent account of the topics that were to preoccupy Berlin throughout his life. . . . It is a history of ideas, wonderfully under control, always with the sense of how those ideas have impacted on other ideas and eventually on the contemporary period."--Tracy B. Strong, University of California, San Diego "In a dark century, he showed what a life of the mind should be: skeptical, ironical, dispassionate and free."--Michael IgnatieffBerlin, Isaiah is the author of 'Roots of Romanticism The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.', published 2001 under ISBN 9780691086620 and ISBN 0691086621.