The man in his letters …

… Learning a Lot About Isaiah Berlin by John Banville | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 In 1963 he wrote to the British intellectual and Labour parliamentarian Richard Crossman about a newspaper review in which Crossman had returned to “your old bone…on which you gnaw and gnaw—the fiddling dons of Oxford, dreary and craven pedants engaged in their petty and destructive tasks while worlds are crashing and great problems are crying out for solution.” Responding to the charge, IB reminds Crossman of the German “political professors who thundered away and supplied plenty of ideology for 1871 and 1914,” and reminds him of Friedrich Meinecke’s Die deutsche Katastrophe of 1946, “one of the noblest tracts of our times” and “a sufficient answer to those who want professors to plug political programmes and ideologies, however sincere and eloquent.”

How prophetic.