Isaiah Berlin: A Life — 6: All Souls

1. 1. Berlin viewed his six years at All Souls in the 1930s as the happiest of his life, where his need for company, talk, gossip, and fascination with others' lives flourished.
2. 2. Berlin never felt alone among Englishmen, unlike his fellow foreigner John Plamenatz, who felt excluded by silent complicity.
3. 3. Berlin criticized intellectuals for lacking 'worldliness' or a 'sense of reality' about power and influence, which he himself rejoiced in.
4. 4. Berlin described Oxford in 1937 as 'a very tight, self-contained system with a private and sometimes unreal and perverse system of symbols and values, usually out of relation with the outer world'.
5. 5. Berlin's friends perceived him as priggish and disapproving of overt homosexuality, leading to tensions with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.
6. 6. Berlin's first serious emotional encounter was with Rachel 'Tips' Walker, who proposed marriage at London Zoo; he refused, leading to her severe depression and eventual lobotomy.
7. 7. Berlin accepted the commission to write a volume on Karl Marx for the Home University Library in 1933, despite knowing little about the subject and holding Marx's theories in distaste.
8. 8. Berlin discovered Alexander Herzen while browsing in the London Library, identifying with him as an aristocratic renegade who reconciled genuine commitment with freedom from dogmatism.
9. 9. Berlin supported the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, calling it the litmus test for where one's friends stood politically, but noted it was the only clear-cut issue.
10. 10. Berlin fell out with his friend Adam von Trott over a letter von Trott wrote to the Manchester Guardian denying discrimination against Jews in German courts.
11. 11. Berlin remained skeptical of von Trott's motives even after von Trott joined the plot to assassinate Hitler, viewing him as an ambitious and politically ambivalent figure.
12. 12. Berlin's Jewishness defined his ultimate commitments, as seen in his firm judgment of von Trott and his resistance to sentimentalism.