Eagleton, Terry. "Urbane Sprawl." GUARDIAN June 27, 2009.

Berlin, Isaiah. Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960. Ed. Henry Hardy, Jennifer Holmes and Serena Moore. London: Chatto & Windus, 2009. The child of Hasidic Jews who fled Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, Isaiah Berlin spent the rest of his days in an Oxford that might have been purpose-built for him. Oxford is one of the great hubs of the British establishment, but prefers to see itself as a haven for free spirits and flamboyant individualists. A don might endure the inconvenience of standing for hours in a pub with a parrot on his shoulder, simply to hear the admiring whisper: "He's a character!" Eccentricity was valued more than erudition. In Berlin's day, the colleges were full of men (and the odd woman) who mistook a snobbish contempt for the shopkeeping classes for a daring kind of dissidence. Oxford thus had the best of both worlds. It was firmly locked into the circuits of power, wealth and privilege, yet it cultivated a cavalier indifference to them. Its colleges mixed luxury with monastic austerity. The place was worldly and lofty at the same time. Berlin himself was as much at home in the US Congress as in the senior common room. Dons could win themselves some vicarious power by churning out the political elite, while posing as genteel amateurs. The trick was to talk about Hegel in the tones of one talking about Henley regatta. If Oxford was a centre masquerading as a margin, it proved a suitable home for Berlin, an exotic outsider who nevertheless hailed from an impeccably anti-revolutionary background. As with other of Oxford's blithe spirits, his taste for the off-beat and idiosyncratic served to disguise a deeper conformity. He shared with Oscar Wilde and T. S. Eliot the outsider's ferocious hunger to be accepted (he was the first Jew to be elected to an All Souls fellowship) and turned himself into a deadly accurate parody of the English establishment, all the way from his well-tailored waistcoats and quick-fire donnish gabble to his careless habit of overlooking western political crimes while denouncing Soviet ones. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/27/isaiah-berlin-enlightening-letters-review.