BOOK REVIEW: 'Enlightening: Letters 1946-60'

ENLIGHTENING: LETTERS 1946-60

By Isaiah Berlin

Edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes

Trafalgar Square, $50,

845 pages, illustrated

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

More than a decade since Sir Isaiah Berlin died at age 88 in Oxford, loaded with honors and distinctions academic and other, debate still rages in intellectual circles as to just where he stands as a thinker. Was he a brilliant and original contributor to the field of political philosophy or a mere synthesizer of what he had gleaned from recondite figures in past centuries?

Worse still, at least in the view of the academy, was he - horror of horrors - a mere popularizer, adept at scintillating but essentially vacuous exposition of ideas? But one thing about him was beyond dispute: He was one of the greatest talkers - lecturer, broadcaster, raconteur - who has ever lived. And this despite a breakneck speed of delivery and a thick Russian accent that made only a fraction of his spoken jewels intelligible to most listeners.

In this new volume of letters, superbly edited and annotated, readers have an extraordinary opportunity to taste just what that conversation was like, thanks to Berlin's discovery of the dictaphone as a way of coping with the many demands on his time.

Thus these extraordinary letters, transcribed with great difficulty and care, by those attuned in every sense to their author and accustomed to his ways, replicate to an extraordinary degree that torrential conversation with its preternatural mix of gossip, philosophy and politics. Indeed, so effective was this device in capturing all that Berlin had to say that this substantial volume represents less than a quarter of his letters during the 14 years it covers.

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