In this volume, the third of four, Isaiah Berlin creates a new institution in Oxford, securing his place in history as a charismatic intellectual leader as well as a prominent thinker in his own right. Wolfson College is today the largest graduate college in Oxford, a thriving research community imbued with Berlin’s remarkable personality.
In the period covered here (1960-75) Berlin dines with President John F. Kennedy on the day he is told of the Soviet missile bases in Cuba; JFK and his brother Robert are assassinated; the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967 creates problems that are still with us today; Richard M. Nixon succeeds Johnson as US President, and resigns over Watergate; and the long agony of the Vietnam War grinds on in the background.
At the same time Berlin publishes some of his most important work, including Four Essays on Liberty – the key texts of his liberal pluralism – and the essays later included in Vico and Herder. He talks on the BBC Third Programme (later Radio 3), and appears on television and in documentary films. He is a director of Covent Garden, and is appointed to the Order of Merit. He spends many months in the US, principally as a visiting professor at Harvard, CUNY and Princeton. He gives numerous lectures, especially his celebrated Mellon Lectures in Washington, DC, in 1965, later published as The Roots of Romanticism.
Behind the public events there is a constant stream of gossip and commentary, acerbic humour and warm personal feeling. Berlin writes about an enormous range of topics to a sometimes dazzling cast of correspondents. He clarifies and amplifies his ideas and reacts – always vividly and entertainingly – to the people and places he encounters. The social and intellectual comedy of the period finds its perfect observer and narrator, and Berlin displays his own personality in all its inspiring and maddening complexity. Here, too, are passionate letters to his wife Aline, included for the first time. This new volume leaves no doubt that Berlin is one of the very best letter-writers of the twentieth century.