Intellectual hero to Noel Annan, whose political heroine is Margaret Thatcher, should Isaiah Berlin be left to the - 'unfashionable' - enthusiasms of Our Age? Or consigned to the plaudits that have broken out for his latest volume from the Spectator to the New Statesman? He himself strikes a more modest note. 'I talk about other people. I examine their views. But what about me?' he said recently. His opinions were just local currency. 'My ideas are very English. I've thrown in my lot with England. It's the best country in the world.' Such loyal self-deprecation is scarcely less suspect.

LRB 20 December 1990 | PDF Download