And even his writing – a lot of the things we know as his writings – are actually transcriptions from talks. You mention him talking – he’s renowned as a talker. I didn’t know about him before, but he was intensely alive and talked about ideas in a fascinating way. I arrived for the interview and was immediately very struck by the man who was in charge of the proceedings – Isaiah Berlin. It wasn’t yet in its new buildings – the buildings which it occupies now, which Berlin was influential in commissioning – but occupied two separate houses in the Banbury Road. I was interviewed at Wolfson in January 1972.
I’m very grateful to Merton, because had I not failed there I wouldn’t have applied to Wolfson. I did try to get into Merton College, but failed.
I had been an undergraduate in Oxford, and after a year off doing other things I wanted to return to do graduate work in philosophy. I first met him because I applied to Wolfson College, a graduate students’ college, in Oxford in 1971. He went to America a lot afterwards as a visiting professor, but never took up a full-time post there. He was there right through from being an undergraduate until he died, apart from a period during the war when he served the British government in America – in New York and Washington – commenting on American political affairs. He went to Oxford, and Oxford became his spiritual home – his intellectual home – for the whole of his life. But he denied that he was English: he said he was, and remained, a Russian Jew. He achieved a key position right at the heart of the British establishment, which he somehow underlined by always wearing a three-piece suit. He was one of numerous émigrés from both Nazism and Communism in the UK who had a great influence on our culture: they’ve often been written about. He was an émigré Russian Jew who came to Britain at the age of eleven, leaving the Soviet Union because of the after-effects of the Russian Revolution.
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