A commemorative lecture delivered at the Harvard Club in New York on 2 June 1998

In television parlance, Isaiah Berlin was what is called a talking head. Not only that inimitable voice but his whole face was continually animated, his eyes sparkling – and they were beautiful eyes, as Greta Garbo once had occasion to remark. Those eyes had witnessed much calamity, particularly to Russians and Jews whose communal identity Isaiah shared, and they moistened as well at the loss of lifelong friends, like Stephen Spender, about whom Isaiah spoke with tender affection when we met two summers ago, by chance just a few days after Spender's death. But it was more generally the vitality of his enthusiasms – social, intellectual, perhaps above all musical – which his eyes displayed. He was continually bemused at his own good fortune, at the excess of the esteem in which he was held over his actual achievement, which he would not have failed to stress this very evening if he could speak for himself. ‘What have I done in my life?’ he used to ask when such honours as the Order of Merit or the Presidency of the British Academy were bestowed on him, even before Henry Hardy had begun so assiduously to assemble and edit his occasional publications and broadcasts for a wider audience. ‘A little book on Marx and a handful of essays,’ he would reply to his own question. ‘Grossly overrated. Long may it last!’

It was of course his voice that we remember most of all – its richness, its humour, its velocity. If he completed a lecture in less than the allotted time, he might apologise for having arrived a fraction late by leaving early: ‘Goodbye.’ In virtually every one of his public lectures in Oxford, New York and elsewhere, his was the face that launched a thousand quips. I recall his hurtling through the twenty-eight alternative readings of Machiavelli which were to become a chapter of Against the Current, as entranced students listened while the insecure stenographers among them hopelessly failed to get it all down. Isaiah himself, of course, had not brought along a text at all. He spoke from memory, without props, apart perhaps from a crumpled sheet of paper at the lectern or even in his pocket, which he seldom consulted.