Isaiah Berlin: A Life — 5: Oxford

1. 1. Berlin entered Oxford in 1928 as a plump, bookish Jewish undergraduate at Corpus Christi, a small, conservative college that opposed modern subjects like PPE.
2. 2. Berlin's rooms became a hub for talk and gossip among a circle of friends including Stephen Spender, Bernard Spencer, and Martin Cooper, focusing on arts rather than politics.
3. 3. Berlin's philosophy tutor Frank Hardie taught him intellectual self-discipline and made clarity an obsessive value, becoming the most important intellectual influence on his undergraduate life.
4. 4. Maurice Bowra, a celebrated and controversial don, became a liberating influence on Berlin, giving him confidence to let his talk flow and build a public persona around brilliant garrulousness.
5. 5. Stephen Spender's letters from Germany in the early 1930s forced Berlin to confront the rise of Nazism and the political realities outside Oxford's cloistered world.
6. 6. Berlin's visits to the Salzburg Festival from 1930 to 1938 were central to his life, where he experienced Toscanini's performances as a fusion of moral conviction and musical expression.
7. 7. Berlin's love of music, especially the classical repertoire, was both aesthetic and ethical, teaching him emotional authenticity and a distinction between true and false feeling.
8. 8. After gaining first-class degrees in Greats and PPE, Berlin was elected a prize fellow at All Souls in 1932, the first Jew ever elected to the college, catapulting him from obscurity to the pinnacle of English academic life.