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“... of ‘Western civilisation’ – were soon notorious, and its author (‘the awful Dr Hayek’ as Isaiah Berlin called him) was widely seen as violating a benign national consensus.George Orwell praised Hayek for having the courage to be ‘unfashionable’, but was otherwise unimpressed. We already know, he said, that ‘collectivism is not inherently ...”

“... of a new biography and intellectual study by Aileen Kelly (to whom we owe re-editions of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s works). He arrives with immense revolutionary credentials: E.H. Carr, whose Bakunin was his own favourite book, called him ‘one of the completest embodiments in history of the spirit of liberty’. Dr Kelly rather dislikes her ...”

“... that can limit our freedom of action’? A reasonable question, one might think, not only about Isaiah Berlin’s influential defence of ‘negative’ against ‘positive’ liberty but about the whole tradition of liberalism. Yet Skinner’s own understanding of liberty is not immune to the same awkward question. The contest between republicanism and ...”

“... emotion.The curators of Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (until 30 November), have reconstructed the atlas from its last, and quite advanced, version of 1929.* The lighting is dim and the panels are suspended on thin metal wires, casting rhomboid shadows on the floor – a control and geometry far from the ...”

“... of the Palace’s hospitality, I think at some kind of celebration of the many achievements of Isaiah Berlin. Anyway, this broken chain of corgis came sputtering into the room. People were scraping and so on. The queen talked to me about the war in Vietnam and said the Americans appeared to be doing rather badly.The grave of Henry Vaughan can be found ...”

“... belief in the utility of norms may also have been weakened by one feature of the pluralism of Isaiah Berlin – a thinker whose work has done much to shape Garton Ash’s understanding of freedom. Berlin sought to apply an idea of political tolerance not only to persons but to whole cultures; the reason was that ...”

“... of Arts at Harvard, a fellowship at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she attended lectures by Isaiah Berlin and had classes with A.J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch; most fatefully, a sojourn at the Sorbonne, where, like Audrey Hepburn pixie-ing through the new philosophy of Empathicalism in Funny Face, she met – oh, enough roll call. You ...”

“... gets my vote, including the Prince of Wales. 9 June. Reading Enlightening, the latest volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters, which has been rather grudgingly reviewed. One redeeming thing about Berlin – if he needs redeeming – is that he likes women. He likes talking to them, he likes writing to them, gossiping ...”

“... human beings. Most of what I said in the first two articles can be seen as footnotes to Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. Berlin says there, as I did in ‘The Contingency of Language’, that we need to give up the jigsaw puzzle approach to vocabularies, practices and values: to give up, in ...”

“... archive-based history that is now being written. The revisionist historians were mainly foxes, in Isaiah Berlin’s division between the fox who knows many things and the hedgehog who knows one big thing. But hedgehogs were quite the wrong animal to choose to exemplify the ‘one big truth’ squad. It may be that the brain of the hedgehog works in the ...”

“... has been quite intentionally hidden or because it was never there in the first place. When I read Isaiah Berlin’s great essay on Vico in Against the Current I came to understand why many people, from Disraeli to Emerson, have said that history is really nothing more than biography, for Berlin describes the kind of ...”

“... cliché. 30 September. Finish reading The Guest from the Future by György Dalos, an account of Isaiah Berlin’s visit to Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in November 1945 and its disastrous repercussions on Akhmatova’s career, or, at any rate, on her relations with the authorities. Neither the poet nor the philosopher comes out of it particularly ...”

“... for finally accepting: ‘It was a club his friends thought he ought to belong to – as they (Isaiah, Stuart, "K” [Kenneth Clark], Noel, Freddy) did.’ Part of the difficulty of saying anything even halfway critical of Spender is similar to the difficulty of raising even the mildest reservations about the genre of contemporary literary biography: one ...”

“... her a place in public life either. So what did she do? She made a public sphere of her own, in her Berlin garret, where she read books, wrote wonderful letters, made friends with Goethe himself and hosted salons, attended by Schlegel, the Humboldts, Heinrich Heine and occasionally Hegel too. ‘From this coign of vantage, in letters as in life,’ Rose ...”

“... in tandem. Among other connections, a turn towards Jewish themes and problems, from the time of Isaiah to that of Wojtyla, is noticeable. Each of these strands in Ginzburg’s writing is an invitation to thought. The first question that comes to mind is this. Why does epistemology figure so prominently in the work of a historian who has otherwise often ...”