Sir Isaiah Berlin OM CBE FBA (24 May/6 June 1909[4] – 5 November 1997) was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas.

[5] Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially by his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy.

Born in Riga (now the capital of Latvia, then a part of the Russian Empire) in 1909, he moved to Petrograd, Russia, at the age of six, where he witnessed the revolutions of 1917.

[7] An annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture is held at the Hampstead Synagogue, at Wolfson College, Oxford, at the British Academy, and in Riga.

[12] Isaiah Berlin spent his first six years in Riga and later lived in Andreapol (a small timber town near Pskov, effectively owned by the family business)[13] and Petrograd (now St Petersburg).

On Angliiskii Prospekt, they shared their building with other tenants, including an assistant Minister of Finnish affairs namned Ivanov, Princess Emeretinsky, and the composer Maximilian Steinberg with his wife Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova, the daughter of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

[15] Berlin witnessed the February and October Revolutions both from his apartment windows and from walks in the city with his governess, where he recalled the crowds of protesters marching on the Winter Palace Square.

[17]Feeling increasingly oppressed by life under Bolshevik rule, which identified the family as bourgeoisie, the family left Petrograd, on 5 October 1920, for Riga, but encounters with anti-Semitism and difficulties with the Latvian authorities convinced them to leave, and they moved to Britain in early 1921 (Mendel in January, Isaiah and Marie at the beginning of February), when Berlin was eleven.

[19] In addition to Russian and English, Berlin was fluent in French, German, and Italian, and he knew Hebrew, Latin, and Ancient Greek.

Yet there was no backlash, no resentment at these breathless marathons, because Berlin's essential modesty and good manners eliminated jealousy and disarmed hostility.

He graduated in 1928, taking first-class honours in his final examinations and winning the John Locke Prize for his performance in the philosophy papers, in which he outscored A. J.

[25] While still a student, he befriended Ayer (with whom he was to share a lifelong amicable rivalry), Stuart Hampshire, Richard Wollheim, Maurice Bowra, Roy Beddington, Stephen Spender, Inez Pearn, J. L. Austin and Nicolas Nabokov.

[26] Prior to this service, however, Berlin was barred from participation in the British war effort as a result of his being born in Latvia,[27] and because his left arm had been damaged at birth.

[35] As later revealed, when he was asked to evaluate the academic credentials of Isaac Deutscher, Isaiah Berlin argued against a promotion, because of the profoundly pro-communist militancy of the candidate.

On his death, the obituarist of The Independent wrote: "he was a man of formidable intellectual power with a rare gift for understanding a wide range of human motives, hopes and fears, and a prodigiously energetic capacity for enjoyment – of life, of people in all their variety, of their ideas and idiosyncrasies, of literature, of music, of art".

[37] The same publication reported: "Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time.

[40] Berlin is known for his inaugural lecture, "Two Concepts of Liberty", delivered in 1958 as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford.

[1] In Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Berlin argues that Hamann was one of the first thinkers to conceive of human cognition as language – the articulation and use of symbols.

Berlin's argument was partly grounded in Wittgenstein's later theory of language, which argued that inter-translatability was supervenient on a similarity in forms of life, with the inverse implication that our epistemic access to other cultures entails an ontologically contiguous value-structure.

[46] "The Hedgehog and the Fox", a title referring to a fragment of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, was one of Berlin's most popular essays with the general public, reprinted in numerous editions.

Liberals in the English-speaking tradition call for negative liberty, meaning a realm of private autonomy from which the state is legally excluded.

Berlin also contributed a number of essays on leading intellectuals and political figures of his time, including Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Chaim Weizmann.

The society invites world famous academics to share their research into the answers to life's great concerns and to respond to students' questions.

In the last few years they have hosted: A.C. Grayling, Brad Hooker, Jonathan Dancy, John Cottingham, Tim Crane, Arif Ahmed, Hugh Mellor and David Papineau.

[56] Apart from Unfinished Dialogue, all books/editions listed from 1978 onwards are edited (or, where stated, co-edited) by Henry Hardy, and all but Karl Marx are compilations or transcripts of lectures, essays, and letters.