Isaiah Berlin in the Media

As a student of Isaiah Berlin’s back in the late 1960s, I have been intrigued by the media treatment of his hundredth birthday, which with one or two exceptions, faithfully celebrates both the memory of his dazzling personality and his role as the philosopher of liberalism in the age of the Cold War. His ideological position had little to do with why I went to study with him, after taking a first degree in philosophy, since I was fast becoming a Marxist, but my intellectual interest was the link between Marx and the Romantics, and I’d heard him lecture on the latter and read his book on the former, and he clearly knew a great deal about both.