Tributes

Summary

When the annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture series at Wolfson College, Oxford, was inaugurated in May 1991 by Stephen Jay Gould, Berlin took the stage beforehand to thank the College, and told the audience of his reaction when he was invited to the lecture:

When I first received the invitation, I misread it: it seemed to me to say ‘Sir Isaiah Berlin Memorial Lecture’. At this point I said to myself ‘Déjà? They don’t expect me to live to the end of May?’ But then I read it again: I’d read the word ‘Inaugural’ as ‘Memorial’. At this point I remembered a story which I should like to tell you.

Once upon a time there was a beggar – a very persistent beggar who was rather good at extracting sums of money out of kindly or gullible people, which enabled him to live. There was a man in his town of extreme hard-heartedness, a heart of stone, who never gave anything to anybody. The beggar went to see him and told him the story of a widow who had six children who were barefoot and starving – the widow herself suffered from every known disease. The squalor, the poverty and the misery of the home was something unbelievable. Even this man, even his hard heart, was touched, and he gave the beggar a sum of money. At some point he decided to find out how the money was spent, so he made enquiries about the widow. He found that the widow was in fact the beggar's wife. He then sent for the beggar and said, ‘You said she was a widow, but she is your wife!’ To which the beggar said, ‘Why should you mind my still being alive?’ Those are precisely my feelings now. When I read the invitation again and saw it was not ‘Memorial’ , I breathed again. But I must say I couldn’t have asked for a more distinguished body of mourners.

Noel Annan

When I heard that Isaiah Berlin had died, I sat down and read the letters we had written each other since 1950, and he lived again. He wrote as he talked, and he was the most dazzling talker of his generation. Strangers might hardly understand a word because his tongue had to sprint to keep up with the pace of his thoughts. Ideas, similes, metaphors cascaded over each other.