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“... powerful as on singers. He was a master of make-up, disguise, impersonation, and possessed of what Isaiah Berlin has recalled as terribilita – a gift he shared, by all reports, with Edmund Kean – holding his audiences by freezing them into submission, whether he presented himself as the haunted Boris Godunov or the seedily comic Don Basilio in Il ...”

“... moves purposefully through history; and according to more professional historians of ideas, like Isaiah Berlin, he is wrong about this. However that may be, the underlying purpose of Trilling’s contrast seems to be to confront, as usual, the two halves of the opposing self, so as to suggest not only how each appears in literary representation, but how ...”

“... for her book. There were also the ambiguously situated onlookers (maybe participants too?) like Isaiah Berlin and one or two others, in addition to some of the people now gathered around the New York Review of Books. What is remarkable about the list of names she spools out is not only their number and even distinction (Robert Lowell, Jackson ...”

“... was able to get a temporary job at the Economist and later wrote for the Observer – even if Isaiah Berlin made sure he was denied a teaching post at Sussex. Serge didn’t have his luck.Curiously, Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography of Trotsky doesn’t mention The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, which Serge wrote with Natalia ...”

“... There is a lot of fun in this book, especially in the circuitous and patronising letter from Isaiah Berlin huffing and puffing about Mehta’s article about Oxford philosophers: ‘The New Yorker is a satirical magazine, and I assume from the start that a satire was intended and not an accurate representation of the truth.’ The comic problem here ...”

“... madman, an incendiary, a caster of verbal filth’. But it is surprising more recently to find Isaiah Berlin lumping Burke in with ‘reactionary thinkers’ such as Joseph de Maistre. Berlin’s friend Stuart Hampshire is contemptuous not simply of Burke’s views but of the quality of his thought: Burke’s ...”

“... as an intellectual event for progressive people. It is, in a gentlemanly way, one more goodbye to (Isaiah) Berlin. Can Romanticism be similarly‘discovered’? Certain inquiries – pursued in this journal, among other places – suggest affirmative answers. Two notable studies have appeared recently: Marilyn Butler’s ...”

“... The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. Small wonder that writers from Robert Graves to Noel Coward to Isaiah Berlin have been inflated to fill up gaps. It is the greatest of Douglas’s posthumous misfortunes that his brilliant inward-looking talents, so suited to a time obsessed by inward identities, should have guaranteed him a place as one of its icons. A ...”

“... Joan Rufus Isaacs, the daughter of the Marquis of Reading, and introduced her to his old chums, Isaiah Berlin and Freddie Ayer. They remained married to the end, and he spoke and wrote of her fondly, when he mentioned her at all. He failed to tell her before he died, however, that he had left most of his money to the University of East ...”

“... worth rebutting. But his lectures were popular with students, and in the early 1930s the young Isaiah Berlin singled him out as ‘the only philosophy tutor in Oxford who is also a man of genuine culture’ –‘a very sly lively Continental sort of philosopher … very exciting and risky … even sensational’. Collingwood was never aware of ...”

“... here it would be a short step to sceptical democratic liberalism in the manner of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin or Richard Rorty, and perhaps to a celebration of politics as the noble art of fostering conversation across doctrinal divides. But that isn’t the route MacIntyre took. For him, liberalism is no more than a front for capitalist ...”

“... who is engaged in a study of Burke as a man of profoundly divided mind and quotes with approval Isaiah Berlin’s Kantian phrase ‘the crooked timber of humanity’, has nevertheless got himself to a point where anyone else’s ascription of crooked timber to Burke means that they are still under Namier’s bony thumb. The danger here is, first, that ...”

“... his historian’s skills and prove to the world, once and for all, that Hitler really was dead. In Berlin, he explored the derelict bunker and then set off in a jeep across Germany to find witnesses. He enjoyed these ‘delightful journeys, motoring through the deciduous golden groves of Schleswig-Holstein’ along empty roads. But this was September ...”

“... Winston Churchill’s decision to drop the world’s first atomic bomb on Berlin on 1 July 1947 wasn’t a difficult one. The war hadn’t been going well since the landings in the Pas de Calais in May 1946 were thrown back with terrible losses – a failure that had much to do with the amount of treasure and materiel that had been diverted to Britain’s nuclear weapons programme ...”

“... a precarious childhood in postwar Vienna; brief but exalted adolescence in the last days of Weimar Berlin; removal from Nazism to England and final ascent towards Cambridge, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Touching portraits of his parents – hapless English father and fragile Austrian mother, both dead by the time he was 14 – sketch one psychological ...”