Isaiah Berlin was a much-loved friend and a dominant influence on my thinking as an historian. His death in 1997 left a void that cannot be filled. I first met him in 1946 playing tiddlywinks on the floor of his room in New College. The letters in this book of some 700 pages, magnificently edited by Henry Hardy, cover his life before that date: at Oxford before the war, his time in wartime New York and Washington and his visit to Russia in 1945.
What do the letters tell us of Berlin’s life up to 1946? First of all the central importance of his Jewish family. He was born in Riga in 1909, his father a prosperous timber merchant who had escaped with his family the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution to settle in England in 1921. The father appears in the letters as a colourless figure. His mother was anything but colourless, a woman of strong convictions as a Zionist, above all of enormous energy. Perhaps dissatisfied in her marriage, she poured her vitality and love into Berlin, her only child. Her concern for his health became obsessive. Berlin was, in his many letters to her, economical with the truth; often ill, he always insists to his mother he is ‘flourishing’. It was from his mother that he inherited his abiding passion for music. The early letters chronicle his annual visits to Salzburg: it was ‘paradise: a Toscanini concert the greatest experience of my whole life’.
His near contemporary, the philosopher A. J. Ayer, never denied his Jewishness, but considered it irrelevant to his life. Given his mother’s enthusiastic Zionism this could not be the case with Berlin. A Voltairian sceptic, Berlin could not accept the notion of a personal God — an old man with a beard as he described him — but he regularly observed the Jewish festivals.
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