A leading light amidst the gloom

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.