Search Results

“... Some weeks ago Sir Isaiah Berlin gave a broadcast in which he described his first visit to the legendary Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in 1945 – a visit cut short in its prime by the bellowing of Randolph Churchill in the courtyard outside, hotly pursued by the Russian Secret Police. Alas, such humorous anecdotes will not be found by Berlin devotees in his latest book, Washington Despatches ...”

“... relations.’ In a draft of an essay later collected in Stranger Shores, Coetzee compares her to Isaiah Berlin: In describing the complex and highly ambivalent feelings of Russian liberals to Russian radicals, Berlin captures much of Nadine Gordimer’s attitude towards South African leftist radicals, at least prior ...”

“... a free soul, a vitality in a kind of Russian tradition, something spiritual and cultural.’ When Isaiah Berlin visited the Soviet Union in 1945, he believed that apart from heroic pre-Revolutionary survivors like Pasternak and Akhmatova, the great Russian intellectual tradition had been extinguished. With delight, he now reports – in Granta magazine ...”

“... to write about him – he was not, in spite of his great distinction, world-famous like his friend Isaiah Berlin. But he certainly could have predicted that his widow Jenifer, whose indiscretion was well established, would do nothing to protect his privacy or her own. Perhaps he didn’t care. One never knows how people will feel about what happens after ...”

“... to her by Western intellectuals, and particularly from the visit she received in 1945 from Isaiah Berlin, ‘the guest from the future’, who was then working with Randolph Churchill for the British Foreign Office in Moscow. They talked for a whole night in her room in Leningrad near the Fontanka, and he took his place in the haunting, shifting ...”

“... Roberto Unger, W.G. Runciman. Andreas Hillgruber, Max Weber, Ernest Gellner, Carlo Ginzburg, Isaiah Berlin, Fernand Braudel and Francis Fukuyama. More recently (LRB, 24 September and 22 October), he has extended himself to Michael Oakeshott and others of Oakeshott’s generation on ‘the intransigent right’, and to those in Ukania who have been ...”

“... goal or end. There is, in other words, only one concept of liberty. These observations bring me to Isaiah Berlin, a thinker who devoted himself to many disparate themes, literary and historical as well as philosophical, but whose most important and influential work was on the theory of freedom. It is on that topic that I propose to concentrate. I shall ...”

“... out of everything, a good man and a good friend. I still miss him and treasure his memory. I and Isaiah Berlin were the only members of Oxford University who attended his cremation. All this seems long ago. I am, however, delighted to read that the Mosley affair is causing embarrassment to the Government. After Mosley was arrested he was interrogated at ...”

“... calls him – Richard Titmuss, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, John Berger, E.P. Thompson and Isaiah Berlin. If you need a stereotype of the English socialist, you may as well take this one as any other, though it’s hard to do any worthwhile thinking so long as you burden yourself with such a thing. I infer from Inglis’s reference to ‘the chic ...”

“... future. Only four of the people he classifies as Cold War liberals are discussed at any length: Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar. It is a small sample from which to distil generalisations about the moral failings of an age, but that is what Moyn sets out to do.His approach to their writings is prosecutorial, one charge ...”

“... and utilitarians and, beyond them, to Hobbes. Its most illustrious modern exponent has been Isaiah Berlin, whose own Inaugural Lecture of 1958 examined Two Concepts of Liberty. Berlin (on Skinner’s reading) thought, like his predecessors, that ‘liberty’ is properly ‘negative’ liberty – that is, the ...”

“... to the rationalism of Enlightenment, Novalis can presumably be thought of as participating in what Isaiah Berlin named the ‘counter-enlightenment’. As Berlin remarks, irrationalists such as J.G. Hamann could turn Enlightenment thought to their own purposes, and it is here slyly hinted that Novalis could have ...”

“... of St George and the National Front can find an answer in Mr Tomlinson’s pages. Thirty years ago Isaiah Berlin identified the Extreme Centre, a group whose uniting belief was that all members of the extreme Right and extreme Left should be shot. Mr Tomlinson has provided the Extreme Centre with a brief campaign ...”

“... Russia by other routes before and sometimes after the 1922 expulsions are considered: they include Isaiah Berlin, Roman Jakobson and Pitirim Sorokin, three members of the first wave who had a huge impact well beyond Russian-speaking circles (outside Russia, that is; their work remained unmentionable in the old country until much later). What began as an ...”

“... shows Williams at his best – not arguing with other philosophers, but rather, in the manner of Isaiah Berlin, helping us understand the changes in the human self-image that have produced our present institutions, intuitions and problems. (My preference for the second half of the book may, of course, be due to the fact that it is only in the first half ...”