Lesley Chamberlain at the Dublin Review of Books:
They were indeed potentially quite incompatible. Isaiah Berlin, born in 1909, was fourteen years older than Richard Wollheim, and, coming into the world either side of the First World War, the two men had their roots in different centuries. Though they both made unique contributions to twentieth century British philosophy, their work was unrelated. Berlin was a political philosopher and historian of ideas whereas Wollheim was a Freudian of the Kleinian school and a philosopher of art. He espoused psychoanalysis in his early thirties and had loved painting as an art form since he was a child. And yet ‘we are on very good terms’ – said Berlin sometime between 1988 and 1989, while Wollheim, in his autobiography, Germs, said it had been a ‘sublime’ friendship.
They first met in 1946 when Wollheim, an undergraduate whose studies were interrupted by wartime military service, was studying at Oxford for a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Aged twenty-two, he had returned to Balliol in 1945 to finish his first degree in history and from 1947 to 1949 to pursue his second. Berlin instantly admired his brilliance.
more here.
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