SOURCE: “Friends and Heroes,” in The New York Times, February 8, 1981, pp. 1, 26.

In the following review of Berlin's Personal Impressions, Stansky focuses attention on Berlin's accounts of meetings with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akmatohva.

Only the title is bland. The contents of this fourth and final volume of Isaiah Berlin's Selected Writings bear the distinctive stamp of one of the great thinkers and writers of our age. The general reader, unfamiliar with his work, or put off by the formidable subject matter of the earlier volumes—Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, Russian Thinkers—will find Personal Impressions altogether welcoming and rewarding.

Berlin is something of a mythic figure, not least in the dazzling flow of his conversation. His writing reflects the diversionary excursions, unexpected self-interruptions and recommencements, of a great talker—at home equally with Russian history and literature, with...