Isaiah Berlin: A Life — 12: The Tribe

1. 1. Berlin's wartime Washington despatches earned him a reputation in Whitehall and London society, leading to invitations from hostesses and the BBC.
2. 2. Churchill consulted Berlin on the structure and historical detail of his memoir 'The Gathering Storm,' and Berlin's blunt criticisms led to revisions.
3. 3. Berlin's eccentric teaching style at New College included taking tutorials in pyjamas or in bed, and winding a mechanical mouse during a student's essay reading.
4. 4. Berlin developed the fox and hedgehog distinction from a Greek poem by Archilochus, using it to divide great minds into two types: foxes know many things, hedgehogs one big thing.
5. 5. Berlin rejected continental intellectual models, criticizing Heidegger's explanation of Nazi complicity as 'vaguely tragic but too remote to bring home the sense of the crimes.'
6. 6. Berlin's study of Vissarion Belinsky shaped his own intellectual project: to examine how ideas permeate the intellectual vocation, rather than logical or semantic analysis.
7. 7. Berlin hated writing because it meant taking responsibility, and he avoided responsibility, consciously prolonging his adolescence into middle age.
8. 8. Berlin experienced anti-Semitism when his membership at St James's Club was blocked due to his Jewish extraction, though he was later accepted at Brooks's.
9. 9. Berlin drafted a strong anti-terrorism paragraph for Weizmann's 1946 speech, condemning Jewish terror and arguing that Masada was a disaster, not a model.
10. 10. Berlin visited Palestine in 1947 and concluded that partition and independence were inevitable, but he realized he had no place in the emerging Israeli society.
11. 11. In 'Jewish Slavery and Emancipation,' Berlin argued that Israel restored Jews' right to choose how to live, but rejected Koestler's either/or choice of assimilation or emigration.
12. 12. Berlin corresponded with T.S. Eliot about anti-Semitism, challenging Eliot's 1934 statement that 'any large number of free-thinking Jews' were undesirable.