SOURCE: “On Isaiah Berlin,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIV, No. 20, December 18, 1997, p. 11.

In the following recollection, Hampshire portrays the unity of Berlin's intellect and personality.

By the superabundance of his curiosities and the range of his interests, Isaiah Berlin burst through all the usual restraints and cautions of academic thinking. He was in fact a peculiar kind of genius in academia. True scholarship has behind it a desire, even a compulsion, to dominate and to monopolize a field of study: a totalitarian wish to be first and everywhere in the field, in the spirit of A.E. Housman. Berlin never in his life thought of himself as a scholar and had no desire for mastery or monopoly. When in the summer of 1936 I traveled with him to Ireland on holiday, I remarked, censoriously, that he seemed to study texts only when conversation with his...