I have probably spent more time in Isaiah Berlin's ‘company’ than in that of any other thinker; most of my own work has been concerned, directly or indirectly, with his thought and with themes central to it. I began reading his work when young; the elements of his thought – his arguments and beliefs, his basic categories and terms – have shaped my own. It is therefore difficult for me to take stock of his achievement and its legacy. In trying to do so, I shall simultaneously follow two paths, which intertwine, but involve different perspectives. One is autobiographical; the other seeks to assess the qualities of Berlin’s work which I think particularly distinctive and valuable. The latter, no less than the former, will be a personal view. This is appropriate: for one of Berlin's great contributions is to enrich our appreciation of the role of the personal in intellectual activity, making the intellect's approach to life more appreciative of the value of personality.

I first came across Berlin's name and, shortly thereafter, his work when I was thirteen. I had been interested in history from a young age. Bookish by nature, as I grew more self-aware and introspective – or, perhaps, more self-involved and narcissistic – my interests shifted increasingly away from war and high politics to the history of intellectuals and the practice and philosophy of history. I was also an Anglophile; so my interests tended to British intellectual life and, for reasons I cannot remember, to Oxford. This led me to Ved Mehta's chronicle of disputes amongst British historians and philosophers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fly and the Fly-Bottle. Berlin was not one of those vividly evoked therein; but Mehta did recount, at length, Berlin's polemical exchanges with E. H. Carr about determinism and the role of the individual in history. These questions interested, indeed gripped, me; and I found myself siding with Berlin. I was already resistant to claims that history resembled science, either in the regularity and predictability of its subject matter, or in the degree of certainty achievable by its practitioners. This resistance reflected not only scepticism, but moral anxiety, an unwillingness to see individuals devalued, their freedom of action and stature as actors diminished by grand, impersonal theories.