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“... students of the Student Revolution were revolting against Lord Beloff, Lord Annan and Sir Isaiah Berlin, there must have been something to be said in their favour.’ Yet there were skeletons in Cowling’s cupboard. Before the Suez furore aroused his contempt for liberal indignation, he had explored the possibility of a parliamentary career on ...”

“... is genial, but there are occasional severities in its treatment of persons. Among its heroes are Isaiah Berlin and, with a good deal of qualification, Michael Oakeshott; on the Left there is the author’s contemporary Eric Hobsbawm. Others’ heroes – Raymond Williams, for instance – are sometimes harshly dismissed (‘a nonconformist ...”

“... the first writer to want to be both novelist and philosopher of fiction or history (or both). Isaiah Berlin described an instance of this problem in his characterisation of Tolstoy as a fox, who perceives reality ‘as a collection of separate entities’ and ‘knows many things’, but who, while writing War and Peace, wanted – like the hedgehog ...”

“... beginning, a classical scholar who was elected a prize fellow of All Souls in 1933, a year after Isaiah Berlin. But, apart from his friendship with Berlin, he did not flourish in the complete freedom afforded by All Souls. After two years there he took a teaching job at Magdalen College, tutoring on set texts, and ...”

“... artist of a high order, and therefore entitled to respect and very special treatment,’ says Isaiah Berlin. Brendan Gill remembers him: ‘The most conceited man who ever lived in our time in New York City. Vain to the point where it was a kind of natural wonder.’ His attraction to conspicuous wealth and for women resulted in his flashing gifts of ...”

“... on years of interviews with people who knew Blunt, many of whom – Dadie Rylands, Noel Annan, Isaiah Berlin, Francis Haskell, Michael Kitson, Ernst Gombrich – have since died. She also includes written evidence from the distant past: letters by Blunt’s schoolfriend Louis MacNeice, for instance, and most startlingly, the brisk character sketches ...”

“... Hungary, which is followed by references to Max Weber on politicians, Václav Havel on dissent, Isaiah Berlin on the perils of ‘spiritual freedom’, a verse from Rudyard Kipling’s The Fairies’ Siege and a passage from Anna Akhmatova, which Suu Kyi says gave her the strength to endure house arrest in solidarity with other political ...”

“... in England. He described his hatred of anti-semitism as ‘obsessional’. In 1951 he put up Isaiah Berlin for membership of his club, the St James’s. Berlin was blackballed as a Jew, and clubland lost its appeal for Lyttelton. The other three lived in the hope that Eden would topple Chamberlain, but Eden proved ...”

“... sprung (we mustn’t though be mastered by De Maistre who in his manner sees what’s wrong) as Berlin – Isaiah – shows who dying called for fairness to all those – those Palestinians he never named them who suffered Nakba (catastrophe in 48) and still suffer it – the refugees it’s now their turn to have that ...”

“... entire Vienna State Opera decamped to London at the Third’s behest in 1947. Bertrand Russell, Isaiah Berlin, Tippett, Betjeman and Fred Hoyle became familiar voices. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas made a poet’s living in what Thomas called ‘the thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and ...”

“... Wit’); George Rylands (‘The Don as Performer’); John Sparrow (‘The Don as Dilettante’); Isaiah Berlin (‘The Don as Magus’). The scheme falters somewhat when we reach the Don as Woman. The token chapter on ‘Women Dons at Cambridge’, focusing on the unlikely duo of Jane Harrison and Betty Behrens (with a side glance at Eileen Power, who ...”

“... of course, helping to shape the accepted image of Attlee as small-minded, stolid and pedestrian. Isaiah Berlin bemoaned his ‘minor public school morality’, and his capacity to ‘dehydrate’ any topic. Nevertheless, as a leader of the left, he did possess one curious advantage, which nowadays tends to go unnoticed: he looked the part. A ...”

“... contemporaries in Britain, it is tempting to try to see Wilson as a blend of Orwell, Pritchett and Isaiah Berlin (also writers around whom a fair bit of nostalgic commentary has clustered). But even that alluring amalgam doesn’t altogether catch him, and one element it doesn’t represent is the impression he gave even from quite early on of being a ...”

“... sustain the faithful through the Cold War. Unlike his kindred spirits in Britain and France – Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron were more formidable thinkers – Schlesinger had a particularly intimate relationship with power. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of Richard Aldous’s biography is how slight Schlesinger’s influence in Washington ...”

“... from outside the agony of the body? Relativism is similarly puzzled. Some twenty years ago Isaiah Berlin argued that anyone who does not care at all whether something that gives him pleasure does or does not cause another human being physical pain is radically defective. From there one might go on to argue for a coherent liberal political theory ...”