The theme that links the essays in this book, written over 30 years, is the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia, which Isaiah Berlin describes as "the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world". The author brings to his portraits of Russian thinkers - and his subject range is as diverse as may be expected - a unique perception of the social and political circumstances that produced men such as Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky and Tolstoy.