Isaiah Berlin was the most popular don of his time. While Maurice Bowra boomed, and David Cecil giggled and Trevor-Roper intrigued, Berlin talked his way into the hearts of men — and women. If you were at a party and he entered the room, your spirits rose. If he chose to sit near you, it was bliss. Some found his delivery too rapid, and occasionally a lecture of his turned into an incomprehensible disaster. You had to get firmly on to his wavelength. Once there, the warm wave of talk enveloped you. It was like lying on a sunny beach, waiting for each successive rhetorical roller to saturate you with wit, information, high-level gossip and precious wisdom. Not that he was a monopolist. He listened too. ‘Like all Russians,’ he wrote, ‘I like conversation better than anything else in the world.’
There was no Boswell, alas. Reminiscences of the Superdon, put together by his colleague at Wolfson College, Henry Hardy, do not bring him to life. They are mostly high-minded waffle by grandee mediocrities like Noel Annan, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams. The only exception is a superb pen-portrait by one of his amanuenses, Serena Moore, who provides fascinating details about her boss in sharp, close focus. Bowra envied Berlin ‘his handsome girl secretaries’. This essay shows that one at least had brains too: it is deeply perceptive. If un-Boswellised, however, Berlin was a constant letter-writer, of exceptional vigour. He would dictate letters deep into the night, sometimes for six hours at a stretch (‘Isaiah never goes to bed,’ said Bowra). He also wrote countless letters in his own hand. His handwriting, says Moore,
was a joy to work with … a clear, plain, stable, harmonious and at times ‘painted’ hand, with a very high form level. A ‘painted’ script has a printed, unlinked look, often indicating deep thought and a sense of word order and flow; and a light overall pressure is commonly seen in the writing of those who dislike physical force. It is not a fast, driving hand but a considered and polite one [with] an unmistakable sign of high originality — the letter ‘s’ always written upwards.
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