| I got to know Isaiah Berlin while
I was a graduate student at Wolfson College, Oxford, and he was President. My admiration for him as a person led
me to his writings, which I found deeply sympathetic. By then I was already
involved in book and magazine publishing, and had edited and published a collection
of writings by an eccentric Oxford clergyman,
Arnold Mallinson. My love for creative editorial work and my enthusiasm for Berlin’s
work, too little known at the time, led me to propose a collection of his
scattered essays under my editorship. To my surprise and delight, he agreed.
My interest in Berlin’s
work is the leading example of a general absorption in and commitment to
the challenge of publishing the kind of material that would perhaps not see
the light of day without active, midwifely
editorial intervention. In Berlin’s
case it was a question of putting together and editing previously published
material – something he would never have done himself, and a process which
required persistent and detailed work over a number of years. My work for
Oxford University Press until 1985 was more a matter of commissioning and
editing books that make accessible to a wider readership the fruits of academic
enquiry. The leading example here is the ‘Past
Masters’ series – short paperbacks on principal
intellectual originators of the past – that I founded in the late 1970s.
Publication began in 1980, and the series is still active. The theme of the
series arose directly from my work on Berlin’s
writings. From 1985 to 1990 I commissioned original works of scholarship,
primarily in the field of politics. In 1990 I left Oxford University Press
to take up a Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford, which enables
me to work full-time on the editing of Isaiah Berlin’s unpublished papers,
including letters. One volume (The Magus of the North) appeared in
1993; others will follow.
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