SOURCE: “On Isaiah Berlin,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIV, No. 20, December 18, 1997, p. 13.

In the following homage, Kelly describes Berlin as a teacher and conversationalist.

Few teachers will ever be as much loved and mourned as Isaiah. As a graduate student at Wolfson College, Oxford, whose first president he became in the late 1960s, I was constantly made aware of my great luck: my choice of college within the University had brought me into the daily orbit of what we all sensed was the most fascinating, the most remarkable person we would ever encounter. Soon after I joined the College, he sent me a note asking me to come and discuss my research on the Russian intelligentsia. Out of nervousness I delayed replying until one day he descended on me at lunch, commanding me to come back with him to his office. I emerged nearly...