My first impression of Isaiah Berlin was not all that personal. Some time in the academic year 1948–9 I was a regular attender at a series of lectures he gave in Oxford on what he called ‘logical translation’. I always arrived in time to get a good seat, since he was not all that audible at a distance because of the rapid, torrential style of his delivery. He was talking about what was a widespread practice among philosophers of the early mid-century, that of interpreting statements about some more or less unobvious type of entity in terms of a more obvious, or at any rate more unproblematic, kind. An example would be the theory memorably advocated by Gilbert Ryle in his Concept of Mind, that statements about the human mind are reducible to statements of a hypothetical kind about human behaviour. Thus ‘George is angry’ means the same as ‘If you surprise George, he will shout and throw things about’ , a device which turns something inward and rather mysterious into something public and straightforward.

Isaiah would have none of this. Applying himself to this and other examples of translation – objects into sense-impressions, past events into present traces and recollections, nations into individual people – he set about them in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, urging that the statement being translated just did not feel like the statement into which it was being converted. For a philosopher, particularly at that time, this was an unusually emotional or aesthetic way of going about things.

In the autumn of 1949 I was elected to a Prize Fellowship at All Souls. Since I was single, I immediately went to live in the College. Not very long afterwards, Isaiah came back to All Souls from his Tutorial Fellowship at New College to be a Senior Research Fellow. The proposed topic of this research was the Russian thinker Vissarion Belinsky, one of the Russian thinkers of Isaiah’s ‘remarkable decade’ , along with such better-known figures as Alexander Herzen and Turgenev.

He moved into a noble set of rooms in between the two towers in the Great, or Hawksmoor, Quadrangle, immediately above the dire A. L. Rowse. Still single, he became, as I was, a full-time resident, eating most of his meals in, as I also did.