“... contemporaries in Britain, it is tempting to try to see Wilson as a blend of Orwell, Pritchett and Isaiah Berlin (also writers around whom a fair bit of nostalgic commentary has clustered). But even that alluring amalgam doesn’t altogether catch him, and one element it doesn’t represent is the impression he gave even from quite early on of being a ...”

“... sustain the faithful through the Cold War. Unlike his kindred spirits in Britain and France – Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron were more formidable thinkers – Schlesinger had a particularly intimate relationship with power. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of Richard Aldous’s biography is how slight Schlesinger’s influence in Washington ...”

“... presumably what the Observer thinks is the most important item of news this weekend.7 November. Isaiah Berlin dies. I’ve never understood (as he claims he never understood) why he should have been held in such high intellectual esteem. His writing is windy and verbose and the only one of his books I’ve managed to get through is The Hedgehog and the ...”

“... from outside the agony of the body? Relativism is similarly puzzled. Some twenty years ago Isaiah Berlin argued that anyone who does not care at all whether something that gives him pleasure does or does not cause another human being physical pain is radically defective. From there one might go on to argue for a coherent liberal political theory ...”

“... style has been the quickest route for expatriates like Wilde, Wittgenstein, Ernest Gellner, Isaiah Berlin or Tom Stoppard to become English. In doing so, they compensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocrats, superior to the very middle classes who have marginalised them. In modern England, the patrician is an ...”

“... slightly dashing, more than a bit ramshackle, but totally without calcul and unsnobbish’. Isaiah Berlin and Nancy Mitford appear from time to time and are observed, but it is the background that is compelling as Bowen and her friends career around the countryside from house to house, a combination of dark roads, much alcohol and the absence of ...”

“... described him as a maniacal egotist who took refuge within a ‘cénacle of the faithful’, and Isaiah Berlin thought he had been reduced to peddling some trashy variety of ‘imaginative romanticism’. The gossip did not cease with Wittgenstein’s death (in 1951, at the age of 62) and it has since taken a neuroscientific turn, with speculative talk ...”

“... Sir Isaiah Berlin’s wide range of interests and achievements illustrates the pluralism he admires: music critic, philosopher, writer, professor, civil servant, administrator, college president, fund-raiser, committee man, a lecturer with the rare ability to hold audiences entranced with his enthusiastic display of the living word in crowded lecture halls, on the radio and on television ...”

“... finds Nozick’s derivation of the state riddled with obscurities and a failure in its own terms. Isaiah Berlin, one of the few of Dr Gray’s ninepins who manages to remain upright, gains high praise for his contention that the conflict of values is an ineradicable feature of human experience, thus dispelling, in Gray’s words, ‘the reigning illusion ...”

“... Blunt, and just junior to Louis MacNeice and John Betjeman. Among his friends at Oxford were Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and Stephen Spender, with whom he coedited the magazine Oxford Poetry in 1930. In his excellent introduction to this definitive Complete Poetry, Peter Robinson characterises Spencer as an unconfident poet who, when his luck was ...”

“... he was regarded as distant and enigmatic. For both, work was solace and sanity. Both liked, as Isaiah Berlin said of Blunt, to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and both saw their success and position as a defence against the possibility of exposure. And towards the end, their lives publicly combusted and the secrets tumbled out, Maugham’s ...”

“... the third (yes, third) Taylor Festschrift. (‘One Festschrift is enough for any mortal,’ Isaiah Berlin remarked on hearing about the second.) Wrigley knew Taylor for more than two decades, knew many of Taylor’s students and friends, and was friendly with his first and (especially) third wives. Is this, then, as one of its blurbs ...”

“... political theorist John Gray has also been seen as chameleonic. His passage from Mill to Hayek to Berlin (he has written books on each of them) has prompted charges of swaying with the wind or, still less charitably, being a Vicar of Bray. The Hayek phase coincided with Thatcherism, while Gray’s rejection of the New Right occurred as Labour’s electoral ...”

“... the Martians embraced Weimar’s cosmopolitanism and liberalism, comfortably at home in Vienna or Berlin. Polanyi was an archetypal Martian. His family name was Pollacsek, which his father – a railway engineer and businessman – had Magyarised to Polanyi. His older brother was Karl Polanyi, the economist, journalist and author of the anti-capitalist tract ...”

“... Sounded Out brings with it a strong whiff of that men’s room queue. Acknowledgments to Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sir Ernst Gombrich and to Sir Frank himself, the provenance of the essays in the New York Review of Books, Die Zeit and the TLS, the obligatory gesture of self-depreciation (‘the pieces assembled here are informed by self-doubt’), firmly ...”