Isaiah Berlin—renowned liberal theorist, historian of ideas, Oxford don, cultural gadfly—was one of the great raconteurs of his generation. According to Robert Darnton, a professor of history at Harvard University, Berlin holding forth resembled “a trapeze artist, soaring through every imaginable subject, spinning, flipping, hanging by his heels.” But Berlin, who died in 1997, worried about his reputation for rhetorical brilliance. Was he merely a clever talker, a frivolous wit? His letters, many of them collected in Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960, published by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Random House, in Britain in July (and appearing in America in December), reveal a man at times consumed by self-doubt: “I generally think that everything I do is superficial, worthless, glaringly shallow, and could not take in an idiot child,” Berlin wrote to his friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1952. Berlin was a punctilious and prolific correspondent. Like the first volume of his letters, Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946, published in 2004, Enlightening is a hefty tome—845 pages including the index. “I romanticize every place I come to,” Berlin wrote in 1949. “I find: Moscow, Oxford, Ditchley, Harvard, Washington: Each is a kind of legendary world framed within its own conventions in which the characters, suffused with unnatural brightness, perform with terrific responsiveness.” His many correspondents included the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; Katharine and Philip Graham, publishers of The Washington Post; the diplomat George Kennan; the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann; and the literary critic Edmund Wilson.
more from Evan R. Goldstein at The Chronicle Review here.