SOURCE: “Column,” in Encounter, Vol. LIII, No. 4, October, 1979, pp. 23-5.

In the following essay, a reviewer explores Berlin's challenge to western rationalism.

Maurice Bowra once said of Isaiah Berlin that, “though like Our Lord and Socrates Berlin has not written much”, his influence was immense. As in all Bowra's best jokes, this had a measure of truth in it, when it was said. Indeed, even Berlin's greatest friends and admirers once found it difficult to account for the reputation which, so it seemed, he had so effortlessly acquired.

His rooms in Oxford, in Corpus, All Souls, New College, were always the Mecca of an endless pilgrimage of those who came to sit at his feet and acquire wisdom, and also to enjoy the pleasure of his company and the dazzling effect of his personality; and no one who came was rejected. I myself first met him, when we...