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An extremely well written biography about an influential figure about whom I knew shamefully little.

It was a fascinating life starting in middle class but oppressive Riga and ending in highest echelons of British Society with the Order of Merit and on persona terms with presidents and prime ministers.

Berlin was obviously the most interesting conversationalist you would ever meet and was always near people who mattered so much so that he mattered himself. This included the arts as welt as politics. He was a good friend and a devoted son.

He was hugely hard working. Yet the central paradox for a historian of ideas was how little he wrote. His two ideas of liberty have become central to political thought but it seems a surprisingly short bibliography.