Isiah Berlin was one of the great letter-writers of the twentieth century: witty, indiscreet, passionate, wise and unbuttoned. He also lived through extraordinary moments of twentieth-century history, and these letters capture those moments

Reading this glorious collection of letters is, predictably, a heady experience... rich and irresistable

Incredibly readable and entertaining

Full of insights about everyone and everything. He was an alpha-level gossip, the genius kind... a conversation of wit and substance that you never want to end

The funniest crime novelist to put pen to paper

A transcendentally harmonious and compassionate work

A surprisingly tender book... Amid the terror a classic story about love sneaks through: love lost, love imagined, love morphed into madness

Beautifully written... It puts a human face on the suffering inflicted by the Taliban... Disturbing and mesmerizing, The Swallows of Kabul will stay with you long after you've finished it

Riveting... Spare, taut, and pristinely clear prose... An uncanny knack for making moral tension palpable... Extraordinarily moving

A novel very much in the tradition of Albert Camus, not only in its humanism and concern with the consequences of individual choices but also in its determination to bear witness to the absurdities of daily life... [A] chilling portrait of fundamentalism run amok and its fallout on ordinary people