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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 ...”

“... for Tomorrow, in which J.B. Priestley sits smoking a cigar and reaching for the port while Isaiah Berlin and A.J. Ayer discuss concepts of liberty. Curtis stays with Berlin for an unusually long time, perhaps as relieved as we are to have a talking head worth listening to, especially one so idiosyncratic, caught ...”

“... for Isaiah Berlin My story? Yes, I got my story though not the one I was assigned. It was a Voyage of Discovery all right, but of another kind. The latest Russian Revolution was no sooner known than it– whoosh– un- corked Moscow like shaken champagne, filled Red Square to the brim again with chanting thousands ...”

“... Greeks, though also studies of, and translations from, modern European poetry. But, as his friend Isaiah Berlin later wrote, ‘those who knew him solely through his published works can have no inkling of his genius.’ What Bowra did best was talk. ‘I hear you are the funniest man in the world,’ was the opening gambit of one visiting ...”

“... the virtues of Absent Minds is that it spares us another extended account of the life and times of Isaiah Berlin – I would have put money on his place in this story, along with F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow, who also feature sparsely. Many of the exemplary careers it does describe are full of surprises. The account of ‘Mr Facing-Both-Ways’ Eliot focuses ...”

“... Locke Prize, the All Souls Fellowship; but Ayer’s fate was to be pipped by his contemporaries, Isaiah Berlin, Goronwy Rees and the slightly younger J.L. Austin. As an undergraduate he had been taken up by Maurice Bowra and acquired a certain celebrity by having a mistress, but this was no help to his professional career. The wind that favoured ...”

“... Piraeus, I walled in the whole area. My designs assumed the proportions of Karnak or Speer’s Berlin.’ That’s Unreliable Memoirs on boyhood games with mud, and James is joking. Somewhere along the line, though, the comparisons become routine. James mentions Robert Lowell accusing himself, when mad, of being Hitler, and launches into a riff on the fact ...”

“... that would have put André Malraux to shame. Gary was probably better in the talk department than Isaiah Berlin: the Carl Lewis, one might say, of talkers. One can admire Carl Lewis as an athlete, however, without being overcome by any great desire to run against him. On the other side of Montparnasse, the 14th to be precise, I had a habit of bumping ...”

“... would move on into the breach.’ Solzhenitsyn’s approach reminds one of that Greek epigram Isaiah Berlin used to apply to the two strains of Russian political writing in the last century: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one big thing.’ Solzhenitsyn was the hedgehog of his times: obsessional, intemperate, often cruelly unfair to ...”

“... Thatcher by the historian Hugh Thomas and attended by writers he thought she might admire (Larkin, Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Pritchett, Mario Vargas Llosa and Anthony Powell, among others), which Larkin had found tough going. ‘The Thatcher dinner was pretty grisly. Even now I shudder and moan involuntarily. M says: “Is it death again, or Mrs ...”

“... added: ‘Don’t you find that Joseph is a typical cat-and-a-half?’ When he died, I called Isaiah Berlin and said I’d like to talk to him about Joseph, and especially to hear what he was like when he first arrived in the West. Isaiah said that he, too, wanted to talk with me, not about that, but about what he ...”

“... times now, Scruton has sanctimoniously assaulted a major thinker of our age – Michel Foucault, Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer – in words that anyone of sensibility, friend, acquaintance, enemy, would have dropped down dead rather than see appear above his ...”

“... of what Bismarck called ‘civilian bravery’ (Zivilcourage) – a quality notably lacking in Isaiah Berlin, as Tony himself noted, perhaps not without malice. Unlike the ex-Marxist scholiasts and intellocrates on the Left Bank who, as Auden said of poets, made ‘nothing happen’, Tony understood that a struggle with these new forces could make a ...”

“... we would all want to be woken from. Too much money and too much mother; small wonder that Isaiah Berlin decided David Astor was ‘a neurotic, muddled, complicated, politically irresponsible, unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of somebody or something … a typical poor little American rich boy’. But on the evidence of Lewis’s ...”

“... us,’ says Selbourne, can we turn (in a brute world) for guidance, ethical or practical, to an Isaiah Berlin, a Dworkin, a Nozick, or a Rawls? Of course not. Would you hear of civic obligation from a scholar who, with exquisite care and ethical unconcern, could declare that ‘questions about what it is that citizens may claim as of right in a ...”