![]() ![]() The numbers, even in an age that is used to numbers on a cosmological scale, are too vast. The atrocities committed by Stalin and Hitler, or in their name, have still not been measured in full, and now, in all probability, never will be. More conventional histories of the twentieth century concentrate, for perfectly understandable reasons, on a familiar canon of political-military events: the two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression of the 1930s, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, decolonisation, the Cold War. The world was exposed to the worst century there has ever been from the point of view of crude inhumanity, of savage destruction of mankind, for no good reason, … And yet, here I am, untouched by all this, … That seems to me quite astonishing." ¹īy the time of the broadcast, I was well into the research for this book. ![]() He replied, ‘The mere fact that I shall have lived so peacefully and so happily through such horrors. He was born in Riga in 1909, the son of a Jewish timber merchant, and was seven and a half years old when he witnessed the start of the February Revolution in Petrograd from the family’s flat above a ceramics factory. Interviewed on BBC television in 1997, shortly before his death, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas, was asked what had been the most surprising thing about his long life. INTRODUCTION: AN EVOLUTION IN THE RULES OF THOUGHT ![]()
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