"A Tribute to Isaiah Berlin." THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE December 19, 2009.

Isaiah Berlin was born in Russia a hundred years ago, on 6 June 1909. He grew up to be a distinguished philosopher, a great historian of ideas - tracing the origins and vicissitudes of liberal thought over the last few centuries - and an eloquent defender of liberty. He was a man with very many friends and, this week, we talk about him with one of them: the British political philosopher John Gray. . . . Listen or read the transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2009/2759562.htm.

Wilson, A. N. "Isaiah Berlin: the Dictaphone Don." TIMES July 15, 2009.

• Berlin, Isaiah. Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960. Ed. Henry Hardy, Jennifer Holmes and Serena Moore. London: Chatto & Windus, 2009.
• Hardy, Henry, ed. The Book of Isaiah: Personal impressions of Isaiah Berlin. Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2009.

Isaiah Berlin’s best work is contained in the form of essays and lectures on the history of ideas. Many will have read his short monograph The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), a book which has some of the qualities of good conversation. It takes as its starting point a Greek fragment by Archilochus (quoted to Berlin by Lord Oxford) which states that “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Berlin then sweeps off into one of his favourite devices – the list. Thinkers or writers who were obvious hedgehogs, he believed, were Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust. Shakespeare leads the foxes in to bat, with an impressive team of Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac and, a little oddly, Joyce. But which was Tolstoy? Tolstoy, according to Berlin, was a fox who spent his life wishing he was a hedgehog.

The Hedgehog and the Fox survives as an after-dinner game more than a serious theory. If it is read slowly, it comes apart at the seams. . . .

Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6714593.ece.

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.

Two Reviews of Isaiah Berlin's ENLIGHTENING: LETTERS 1946-1960.

Berlin, Isaiah. Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960. Ed. Henry Hardy, Jennifer Holmes and Serena Moore. London: Chatto & Windus, 2009. Gray, John. "The Cosy Philosopher." Literary Review (June 2009):

Isaiah Berlin used to say that people were his landscape. In the first volume of his letters, Flourishing, edited by Henry Hardy and covering the years 1928 to 1946, he went so far as to declare a positive dislike of nature, suggesting that love of sublime landscapes was linked with reactionary romanticism. It is true that his focus was always on human beings, and this second volume shows him finding fulfilment among them as never before. Returning from war work in the British embassy in Washington, becoming once again and then ceasing to be a bachelor don, taking up the history of ideas and achieving, through a series of radio talks, a degree of celebrity about which he was highly ambivalent, immersing himself in the internecine struggles of All Souls and Oxford, giving advice to heads of state and officials running government agencies - these and other aspects of Berlin's life are vividly captured in this absorbingly readable second selection. There could hardly be a more intimate portrait of Berlin than that which emerges from these letters. But the man himself is not so easily captured, and sometimes appears quite different from the one who seemed always to feel at home in the world. (http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/gray_06_09.html)

Carey John. Times June 7, 2009:

Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was a distinguished Oxford historian of ideas who memorably classified the world’s thinkers (borrowing his terms from an ancient Greek poet) as either “hedgehogs” who “know one big thing” (like Plato or Nietzsche) or “foxes” who “know many things” (like Shakespeare or Montaigne). He seems himself to have been a fox who would have quite liked to be a hedgehog, but was too afflicted by self-doubt, and too fond of dinner parties and country-house weekends, to muster the requisite single-mindedness. Colleagues felt he did not publish enough, but since 1978 Henry Hardy, with occasional co-editors, has devoted himself to gathering up and ­printing, as far as possible, every word Berlin wrote. So far 15 volumes have appeared, including one of early letters. The whole project is clearly an act of homage, even of worship, but the present volume will not, I think, enhance Berlin’s reputation as much as the editors might wish, mainly because it comes close to being unreadable. (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6430260.ece)

Isaiah Berlin Centenary Conference, Department of Government, September 25-26, 2009.

In cooperation with Safra Center for Ethics, Center for Judaic Studies, and Department of Philosophy. Speakers will include: Malachi Hacohen, Janos Kis, Pratap Mehta, MarthaNussbaum, Alan Ryan, Amartya Sen, Michael Walzer, Bernard Yack; Discussants include: Peter Eli Gordon, Erin Kelly, T. M. Scanlon. The conference is free and open to the public and will be held in the Tsai Auditorium, Harvard Center for Government and International Studies, 1730 Cambridge Street.