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“... Winston Churchill’s decision to drop the world’s first atomic bomb on Berlin on 1 July 1947 wasn’t a difficult one. The war hadn’t been going well since the landings in the Pas de Calais in May 1946 were thrown back with terrible losses – a failure that had much to do with the amount of treasure and materiel that had been diverted to Britain’s nuclear weapons programme ...”

“... a precarious childhood in postwar Vienna; brief but exalted adolescence in the last days of Weimar Berlin; removal from Nazism to England and final ascent towards Cambridge, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Touching portraits of his parents – hapless English father and fragile Austrian mother, both dead by the time he was 14 – sketch one psychological ...”

“... like what Vico called ‘la barbarie della reflessione’, a state which is described by Isaiah Berlin in Vico and Herder as follows: ‘A kind of senility and impotence, when each man lives in his own egoistic, anxiety-ridden world, unable to communicate or co-operate with his fellows. This is the situation in which men, although “they still ...”

“... a cast of prominent Europeans from Voltaire and Goethe in the 18th century to Nikolaus Pevsner and Isaiah Berlin in the 20th, with the central (and best) chapters dedicated to the revolutionaries and dreamers of the mid-19th century, so many of whom were to find themselves obliged to flee to London’s safe, if perplexingly unrevolutionary climate. Each ...”

“... Winston might make a match. She had long brown hair, a deep plummy voice, and was later said by Isaiah Berlin, who met her in Cambridge in the 1930s, to be a ‘handsome, smart, awful woman’. Whatever Venetia’s other callings – in middle age she took up aviation, and she had a passion for keeping strange animals, including a Syrian brown bear ...”

“... currently wrecking the Europe they had fled. A rather similar analysis was put forward in 1956 by Isaiah Berlin, whose anthology The Age of Enlightenment offers an intellectual prospectus for his subsequent brilliant career. ‘The 18th century,’ he wrote, ‘was perhaps the last period in the history of Western Europe when human omniscience was ...”

“... which insists that there could never be one moral code, one set of ‘eternal principles’, as Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘by following which alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous and free’. But there is another reason that some writers insist on a ban on torture that they believe must also be violated. And that is to maintain the frisson of ...”

“... vantage point, effectively from another planet. In a renowned essay first published in 1953 Isaiah Berlin distinguished entertainingly between writers who were hedgehogs, knowing one big thing, and foxes, knowing many things. Dante is a hedgehog, Shakespeare is a fox and various other figures fall easily into ...”

“... a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the ...”

“... Drive apartment.‘The Arendt cult is a riddle,’ Walter Laqueur sighed in the 1990s, as Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire had sighed before him. So much reverent attention for someone so ‘devoid of originality, depth and a systematic character’. Was it because women like reading other women, Laqueur wondered, and was this the reason Arendt ...”

“... of the Times Literary Supplement. Josephine Pasternak, the poet’s only surviving sister, and Sir Isaiah Berlin were to have been the first team, we later learn. But even as substitutes, we have everything made easy. We supply three photographs and the Embassy fills in the visa application for us to sign. For my wife, the occasion is full of irony. ‘I ...”

“... ejaculated.I spent four supremely happy years at Oxford and owe my higher education entirely to Isaiah Berlin, who taught me philosophy, tête-à-tête, through 1946-47. I designed my first essay for him with a conscious intent to please but he was not to be seduced; he interrupted me at once and tore my work to pieces. A week later I adapted my first ...”

“... the second and third editions has brought in new names. Four hundred and forty to be exact. Berlin then was Irving (1888-  ), represented by ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’. Now Berlin is Sir Isaiah (1909-  ), with three sentences from one of his Four Essays on Liberty. Poor ...”

“... 17 March) is entitled Aperiatur Terra – ‘let the earth open’ – the reference is to Isaiah 45.8: ‘Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together; I the LORD have created it.’ The Bible is only one of the sources ...”

“... as ‘one of our most cutting minds’, ‘charming even when most devastating or malicious’. Isaiah Berlin said she was ‘much more bitchy’ than Mary McCarthy, ‘but sharper and more original’. ‘The Decline of Book Reviewing’, published in Harper’s in 1959, established her reputation. The essay took the press to task for printing ...”