Book review: Isaiah Berlin’s enlightening letters

Among Oxford's postwar 'superdons', Isaiah Berlin was by far the best talker, said Paul Johnson in the Spectator. If he entered a party, "your spirits rose. If he chose to sit near you, it was bliss. The warm wave of talk enveloped you. It was like lying on a sunny beach, waiting for each successive rhetorical roller to saturate you with wit, information, high-level gossip and precious wisdom." Berlin, whose father was a Russian-Jewish merchant wrote that, "like all Russians, I like conversation better than anything else in the world".

Alas, there was "no Boswell" to record it all, but Berlin was a brilliant, prolific letter-writer; his letters are rich, funny and "packed" with barbed insights and fascinating vignettes – meeting Shostakovich in Oxford, for instance, escorted by Soviet minders. Of Greta Garbo, he says: "My goodness she is dumb." In Einstein he discerns "the inhumanity of a child", while Jean-Paul Sartre is "politically and personally repulsive", AJP Taylor "my most revolting colleague", and Jean Cocteau "a cocotte... small and embarrassing".

Berlin had "an astonishing range" of correspondents, including Churchill, Chaim Weizmann, TS Eliot, Maria Callas, and "virtually every academic who mattered", said Justin Wintle in the Independent. His areas of expertise were equally prodigious: philosophy, Russia, America, literature, music. When his editors, Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes, have finished compiling all three volumes, "I imagine the complete Berlin letters will, as a reading experience, match Boswell, even Gibbon" – thanks not just to his "humour, knowledge and brilliance" but also to the fact that he was "an inveterate gossip" and "not very nice". Even the Queen gets it in the neck: he described her as a "grave, dull, limited, horsey, young, early-Victorian prig" after lunching at Buckingham Palace (and suggesting that she read Lolita).

Berlin was a brilliant talker and essayist, said AN Wilson in the Times. But he was also "malicious, snobbish", and not the colossus he thought he was. While he frittered away his talent gossiping at dinner tables, courting the great and good, and failing to write his great tome on the history of ideas, the contemporaries whom he constantly denigrated actually got some work done. His letters, often spouted into a Dictaphone late at night, are ludicrously long, with endless accounts of "college squabbles" and his social triumphs. They are "not worth the effort required of them", but that's not what makes them depressing. "Reading the book, after all, only takes a week. But writing these tedious, infelicitous, prolix letters took 14 years of a clever man's life."

Enlightening: Letters 1946-1960 by Isaiah Berlin, Chatto & Windus, 845pp, £35, The Week Bookshop £31.50 (including p&p) ·