BOOKISH BON VIVANT

By Paul Gray

Spending time in the presence of Sir Isaiah Berlin was daunting for several reasons. Here was a man who was known and admired by a Who's Who of the 20th century: Einstein, Freud, Picasso, Churchill, Nehru. And then there was his conversation, which tumbled forth with amazing rapidity--he was once clocked at 400 words a minute--all of it gargled through the remaining traces of his childhood Latvian. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan proposed Berlin for knighthood in 1957, the PM suggested that the honor might be deserved "for talking."

Fortunately, Sir Isaiah in print was more comprehensible than in person. Although the Oxford philosopher was casual about his writings--he never attempted a major book--his lectures and scholarly papers, including Russian Thinkers and Against the Current, established Berlin's reputation as a formidably learned defender of liberal values. His most famous and influential essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), divided humankind into those who have one big idea and those who have many smaller ones. Berlin's hedgehogs included Plato and Dante; among the foxes he named Aristotle and Shakespeare. Although too modest to make such a claim for himself, Sir Isaiah was one of the century's most eminent foxes.

--By Paul Gray