1967 An appointment at All Souls with Sir Isaiah Berlin.

 

It’s an enviable room; I don’t think I’ve ever been in one quite like it. Book lined walls, desks and small tables, photographs, deep armchairs with loose floral coverings in one of which Sir Isaiah Berlin is sitting, listening to our pitch.

If you are students and want to set up any kind of club or publish anything, then your activities must be supervised, at least nominally, by what is called a “Senior Member”, someone who must be on the faculty of  Oxford University. Phillip Hodson and I, now in our second undergraduate year, want to publish a magazine, a journal of ideas which we will call Approach.  Sir Isaiah Berlin, quite apart from anything else, is a terrific public speaker and every week his hall in the Examination Schools, just across the road from where we are sitting, is full to overflowing not least because the entire Oxford Left turns out for the best show in town. It’s irrelevant that we don’t agree with much of what he has to say. Phillip and I want Professor Berlin as our senior member. We would also quite like a donation to enable our project. We get both and leave with a cheque for fifty quid, just ten pounds short of the annual value of my college scholarship. And the cheque is handed over accompanied by the encouraging words, “And if your magazine doesn’t come off, you can spend it on champagne”.