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Nigel Hamilton, 5 November 1981

Washington Despatches, 1941-45: Weekly Political Reports from the British Embassy 
edited by H.G. Nicholas.
Weidenfeld, 700 pp., £20, August 1981, 0 297 77920 6
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British Intelligence and the Second World War. Vol. II 
by F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.F.G. Ransom and R.C. Knight.
HMSO, 850 pp., £15.95, September 1981, 0 11 630934 2
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Mars without Venus: A Study of Some Homosexual Generals 
by Frank Richardson.
William Blackwood, 188 pp., £5.95, September 1981, 9780851581484
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Soldiering on: An Unofficial Portrait of the British Army 
by Dennis Barker.
Deutsch, 236 pp., £8.50, October 1981, 0 233 97391 5
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A Breed of Heroes 
by Alan Judd.
Hodder, 288 pp., £6.95, September 1981, 0 340 26334 2
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War in Peace: An Analysis of Warfare Since 1945 
edited by Robert Thompson.
Orbis, 312 pp., £9.95, September 1981, 0 85613 341 8
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... 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 ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Meaney: Coetzee’s Diaries, 21 May 2015

... 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 ...

Living like a moth

Michael Ignatieff, 19 April 1990

The Other Russia: The Experience of Exile 
by Michael Glenny and Norman Stone.
Faber, 475 pp., £14.99, March 1990, 0 571 13574 9
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Inferences on a Sabre 
by Claudio Magris, translated by Mark Thompson.
Polygon, 87 pp., £9.95, May 1990, 0 7486 6036 4
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... 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 ...

The Central Questions

Thomas Nagel: H.L.A. Hart, 3 February 2005

A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream 
by Nicola Lacey.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, September 2004, 0 19 927497 5
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... 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 ...

Anna of All the Russias

John Bayley, 24 January 1991

Selected Poems 
by Anna Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.
Harvill, 173 pp., £5.95, November 1989, 0 00 271041 2
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The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova 
translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited by Roberta Reeder.
Zephyr, 1635 pp., £85, October 1990, 0 939010 13 5
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The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose 
by Bella Akhmadulina.
Boyars, 171 pp., £9.95, January 1991, 0 7145 2924 9
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... 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 ...

Post-Nationalism

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 3 December 1992

English Questions 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 370 pp., £39.95, May 1992, 0 86091 375 9
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A Zone of Engagement 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 384 pp., £39.95, May 1992, 0 86091 377 5
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... 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 ...

A Third Concept of Liberty

Quentin Skinner: Living in Servitude, 4 April 2002

... 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 ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: The Mosleys and Other Affairs, 17 November 1983

... 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 ...

Examples

Denis Donoghue, 2 February 1984

Towards 2000 
by Raymond Williams.
Chatto, 273 pp., £9.95, October 1983, 9780701126858
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Writing in Society 
by Raymond Williams.
Verso, 268 pp., £18.50, December 1983, 0 86091 072 5
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Radical Earnestness: English Social Theory 1880-1980 
by Fred Inglis.
Martin Robertson, 253 pp., £15, November 1982, 0 85520 328 5
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... 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 ...

Radical Mismatch

Stephen Holmes: Cold War Liberalism, 4 April 2024

Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times 
by Samuel Moyn.
Yale, 229 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 0 300 26621 4
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... 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 ...

Factory of the Revolution

Blair Worden: Quentin Skinner, 5 February 1998

Liberty before Liberalism 
by Quentin Skinner.
Cambridge, 137 pp., £19.99, November 1997, 0 521 63206 4
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... 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 ...

Dark Fates

Frank Kermode, 5 October 1995

The Blue Flower 
by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Flamingo, 226 pp., £14.99, September 1995, 0 00 223912 4
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... 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 ...

Sizing up the Ultra-Right

David Butler, 2 July 1981

The National Front 
by Nigel Fielding.
Routledge, 252 pp., £12.50, January 1981, 0 7100 0559 8
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Left, Right: The March of Political Extremism in Britain 
by John Tomlinson.
Calder, 152 pp., £4.95, March 1981, 0 7145 3855 8
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... 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 ...

Proud to Suffer

G.S. Smith: The Intellectuals Who Left the USSR, 19 October 2006

The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia 
by Lesley Chamberlain.
Atlantic, 414 pp., £25, March 2006, 1 84354 040 1
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... 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 ...

To the Sunlit Uplands

Richard Rorty: A reply to Bernard Williams, 31 October 2002

Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy 
by Bernard Williams.
Princeton, 328 pp., £19.95, October 2002, 0 691 10276 7
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... 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 ...

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