Isaiah Berlin was in my view the most distinguished political philosopher and historian of ideas of the 20th century. There is no thinker whose work, expressed in and lucid prose, I read with greater pleasure and whose ideas so convince me they are fundamentally right.
If I had to choose a single book to advise any young person interested in ideas to read it would be Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays On Liberty which consists of a magnificent introduction, alone worth its weight in intellectual gold, and essays on ‘Political Ideas in the 20th Century’, ‘Historical Inevitability’,
