Isaiah Berlin

Born in Riga in 1909, he was six when his family moved to Petrograd and he watched the Russian Revolution unfold. By 1921 they'd left for England; he went through St Paul's and Oxford, and at 23 landed a prize fellowship at All Souls. During the Second World War he worked for the British Diplomatic Service, then from 1957 to 1967 held the Chichele chair in Social and Political Theory at Oxford. In 1966 he helped create Wolfson College and became its founding president. He translated Turgenev, presided over the British Academy, collected honours - CBE in 1946, knighthood in 1957, Order of Merit in 1971, the Jerusalem Prize in 1979. His editor Henry Hardy turned improvised lectures into published work that made value pluralism and liberal theory central to modern thought, and his opposition to Marxism left a mark that lasted long past his death in 1997.