Volume 51, Number 14 · September 23, 2004
A Genius for Friendship
By Timothy Garton Ash
Letters, 1928–1946
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy
Cambridge University Press, 755 pp., $40.00
When you are young, you cannot imagine that the old were ever young. As you get older, that becomes easier. Isaiah Berlin was in his sixties when I first met him in Oxford. Britain's most celebrated public intellectual, an iconic figure with his heavy-rimmed spectacles, dark three-piece suit, and unforgettable, much-imitated, bubbling, allusive, rapid-fire conversation, had characteristically agreed to spend an evening with a small undergraduate society. To a nineteen-year-old student, he seemed close to Methuselah—although, as I would discover over a quarter-century of closer acquaintance, this was a Methuselah with a vast appetite and talent for gossip.
Review, 4131 words
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