Volume 27, Number 3 · March 6, 1980
The Questions of Isaiah Berlin
By Jonathan Lieberson, Sidney Morgenbesser
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas
by Isaiah Berlin
Viking Press, 394 pp., $16.95
Edmund Wilson once described Isaiah Berlin as 'an extraordinary Oxford don, who left Russia at the age of eight and has a sort of double Russian-and-British personality. The combination is uncanny but fascinating.' But even these words from such a usually restrained source fail to do justice to the variety of gifts of this civilized and widely admired man who at one time or another has been a philosopher, a political theorist, an acute practical analyst of American and European politics, a historian of ideas, a biographer of Marx and translator of Turgenev, an active and influential participant in Jewish affairs, a long-time director of the Royal Opera House, founder of Wolfson College at Oxford, and President of the British Academy. Those who have been in his presence have witnessed his intellectual gaiety; he is a man of universal learning, a justly celebrated conversationalist, a man who inexhaustibly enlarges the lives of his colleagues, his students, his friends.
Review, 5848 words
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