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“... Professor Aarsleff kindly sent me a copy of his article before publication; his courtesy enables me to provide an immediate rejoinder. I read it with mounting astonishment. Since I know Professor Aarsleff to be an erudite and scrupulous scholar, I find it difficult to understand what moved him to protest so vehemently that Vico’s view of language, which lies at the heart of his system, is wholly lacking in originality ...”

“... At All Souls in 1932, Lewis Namier provoked Isaiah Berlin by scornfully dismissing the history of ideas – dismissing it in German, though the rest of the conversation (or rather harangue) was conducted in English – as ‘what one Jew cribs from another’. But for some unpredictable migrations and a few world-historical hiccups in the previous decades, this exchange might have been taking place – quite possibly in French – in, say, Warsaw or St Petersburg ...”

“... In his distinguished career as an intellectual historian, Isaiah Berlin has established himself as our foremost collector of stray philosophical puppies. Vico, Herder, Maistre, and now Hamann: these are not household names, not even in the upper reaches of what used to be called the Ivory Tower. Berlin’s interest in them is anything but pedantic, however ...”

“... in the less fastidious quarters of Washington DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth man. Isaiah Berlin was happy, at least when Charles (Chip) Bohlen was unavailable, to furnish an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin was returning from Paris in 1952 when the aeroplane – ‘it was an Air France: Air Chance is a better name’ – ‘caught fire and scenes of extraordinary panic occurred’. Berlin mentions this, jokily and in passing, in several letters, but Alice James, the wife of William James’s son Billy, gets the full story of the disaster that didn’t happen, at least to Berlin ...”

“... outside of time. No one could be more opposed in character to this Platonic temperament than Sir Isaiah Berlin, whose love of the present – and of the presentness of other times and persons in their time – is the true love of life, and whose writings, to the inevitably limited extent that this is possible, attempt to express rather than to rise ...”

“... Intellectual hero to Noel Annan, whose political heroine is Margaret Thatcher, should Isaiah Berlin be left to the – ‘unfashionable’ – enthusiasms of Our Age? Or consigned to the plaudits that have broken out for his latest volume from the Spectator to the New Statesman? He himself strikes a more modest note ...”

“... be, what the Germans call prominente. Among them were Richard Crossman, A.L. Rowse, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin, David Astor and the journalist Shiela Grant Duff, who, in 1982, published a book about their relationship, and followed it up with a volume of their correspondence. At opposite ends of the political spectrum he impressed Lord Lothian and won ...”

“... the fact that many people I admired then – Martin Luther King, Reinhold Neibuhr, the Kennedys, Isaiah Berlin and Wilson himself – were also dedicated Zionists, totally opposed to anything like a Palestinian side. Wilson himself was a philo-semite, and particularly enthusiastic about scholar-warriors like Yigal Yadin, the Israeli general and ...”

“... for the hardest knocks in the book. The stories come in various sizes. Virginia Woolf called Isaiah Berlin a ‘violent Jew’ (I throw in a further story here, to the effect that at his funeral or synagogue memorial service an earwitness friend of mine heard two old Oxford panjandrums agree that the service had gone well – ‘but what was all ...”

“... The fact that it was a club more than a college was the ruin of many of the fellows. Think of Isaiah Berlin, who early in life settled for the career of an essayist, of a middlebrow giving the Establishment potted versions of philosophers whom it was too lazy to read for itself. Berlin told these British clubmen ...”

“... the plot against Hitler. They were part of a circle of young people – Goronwy Rees, Douglas Jay, Isaiah Berlin and others – deeply involved in observation and anguished discussion of what was happening in Europe. Shiela Grant Duff became a journalist – foreign correspondent, virtually unpaid, of the Observer, whose arrangements seem to have been ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin​ was on his honeymoon – he married late – when he first read Dr Zhivago. It was the evening of Saturday, 18 August 1956, and he had just made the short journey back to Moscow from the village of Peredelkino, where he had spent the day with Boris Pasternak. Pasternak’s dacha was part of a complex set up on Stalin’s orders in 1934 to reward the Soviet Union’s most prominent writers ...”

“... Vico in the English-speaking world owes almost everything to the attention he has received from Isaiah Berlin. Before Berlin, Vico was the obscure Neapolitan philosopher who had been ‘discovered’ a hundred years after his death by Michelet and the Romantics, and was subsequently made much of by Italian ...”

“... After making his name in Karlsruhe by discovering how to fix nitrogen from the air, Haber moved to Berlin in 1911 to head the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. There he became a leading figure in the campaign to attract Einstein to Berlin with the offer of a university professorship ...”