One might think that what follows is more about Isaiah than it is about his thought, more anecdote than analysis. Moreover, since it deals with only a very short period in his life – his initial visit as Schweitzer Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) – it might seem too restricted to be illuminating. I think both appearances are misleading.

I met Isaiah in 1966 on his first visit to the City University, and, though I had no way of knowing this at the time, I came to understand that Isaiah in New York was a very different character from the one familiar to his Oxford circle. It might have been that, away from Oxford and England, certain sides of his personality expanded, or that in its special way New York magnified them. Either way, I think he was more real, more himself, when he visited New York, and thus a snapshot of him there should be valuable in itself; it is also the best thing I can present as a tribute to a man so important to my own life.

Those who knew Isaiah and know his work will understand why I am unapologetic about focusing on aspects of his life and character. But it is perhaps worth being more explicit about this. His own writing about any philosopher, writer, musician or politician was never just about that person's thought. In a way few can match, Isaiah was somehow able to see into the mind and character of his subject, weaving a narrative that revealed why that particular person made that particular contribution to human thought and culture. Reading Isaiah, one gets a sense, not simply of ideas, but of their origin in individual human lives. Many of the thinkers Isaiah singled out were, to use his own word, ‘monsters’ , and he never thought Kant's claim about the crooked timber of humanity a merely ornamental metaphor. But Isaiah's interest in human beings was not simply that of a historian of ideas, however gifted he was in this field, nor was it an interest only in monsters, fascinated as he was by them. He had an insatiable curiosity about human beings that was in no way limited to those we have come to regard as contributors to thought and culture.