In 1989 Isaiah Berlin celebrated his 80th birthday. Radio 3 marked the event with a four-hour tribute. Two Oxford colleges held dinners in his honour; there was a symposium in Jerusalem and a special concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London. “Now the decline,” he wrote to an old college friend.
He was quite wrong. That year the Berlin Wall came down and barely another two years later Soviet communism had collapsed. Berlin’s ideas became more relevant than ever. Nationalism and ethnic violence returned to Europe; the fatwa against Salman Rushdie had already raised questions about tolerance in a liberal society. A biography, a two-part BBC interview and now four volumes of letters by Berlin, superbly edited, have confirmed his place as one of the leading British intellectuals of his time.
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