Our family's friendship with Isaiah began with the Russian connection: my mother-in-law Lydia Pasternak-Slater and her sister Josephine. But I personally first encountered him some six years before my marriage, when I came up to Oxford as an undergraduate in Michaelmas Term 1958. Berlin gave his Inaugural Lecture – ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ – on 31 October of that year. Everybody knew that this was one of those lectures that one had to go to (like Edgar Wind's lectures on Michelangelo, or J. L. Austin's on the theory of perception – I still kick myself for not having gone to the latter). I duly joined the spellbound throng in the South School, at first straining to catch every syllable of that inimitable basso cantante, and then gradually realising that one didn't need to catch every syllable, because the important points were repeated several times from different angles and perspectives.

A few weeks (or was it months?) later I was cycling into Radcliffe Square from Catte Street – in those days a motorised thoroughfare, not a pedestrian walkway – when a small car overtook me and drew up opposite the side gate of All Souls. The driver opened his door without looking and knocked me off my bicycle. Fortunately there was no other traffic coming up behind. The front-seat passenger alighted in anxious haste to make his apologies. It was Isaiah. Being totally unhurt, I scrambled to my feet, unable to resist a piece of undergraduate chutzpah. ‘Please don't worry, Sir Isaiah. It's an honour to be run over by such a distinguished personality!’ It made me one of the – surely – very few people ever to see Isaiah at a loss for words.

In 1966 Isaiah was named founding President of Wolfson College. I saw something of him in that context. Wolfson did not yet have its charter as an independent foundation. In approaching the question of investing the embryo college's initial endowment, Isaiah sought the help of his former All Souls colleague, the economist Ian Little, who was now a Fellow of Nuffield and one of those responsible for that college's outstandingly successful performance on the stock exchange. At Ian's prompting I was also brought in, being at that time a Research Fellow and Acting Investment Bursar of Nuffield.

The creation of Wolfson College is one of the notable events of twentieth-century Oxford. Its gossipy aspect, however, remains to be chronicled.