"However the sky grows dark with invitation cards”, Philip Larkin wrote, “. . . Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs." Larkin provides a cautionary instance from recent years of the damage that can be done to reputations by well-meaning editors. On balance, admirers of his work are glad to have his letters and juvenilia as well. One wonders if the same will be said of Isaiah Berlin, who after the conquest of some new social peak would pour a stream of malice and snobbery about his friends new and old into a Dictaphone. Charming in person, brilliant in conversation and – as attested recently in these pages by David Aberbach – an inspiring teacher, Berlin wrote well-turned essays in intellectual history. As far as the big picture of events in his lifetime was concerned, too, he “got it right”. But could he have done more? And was he painfully conscious that he had frittered away his talents at the dinner tables of the rich and grand? A. N. Wilson, reviewing the second volume of his un-pithy letters, thinks so.

Peter Green finds that Anthony Grafton, another distinguished intellectual historian and “Renaissance scholar extraordinaire”, gives “generous and informed credit” in a new collection of essays to the benefits brought by the internet to the Republic of Letters, while being clear that “the great libraries of the Northern Hemisphere will remain irreplaceable for a long time”. John Milton devoted himself to learning, liberty and an actual republic; the best current scholarship and criticism devoted to him, Johanna Harris discovers, addresses the “enduring relevance of Miltonic thought” to the wider world. Michael Hofmann and Thomas Meaney illuminate the work of two novelists, respectively Hans Fallada and William Maxwell, now finding new readers after some years spent in the shadow of more famous names, while Richard Hamblyn sees a new and surprising dimension added to our picture of Charles Darwin, the most famous name of 2009.

Alan Jenkins

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