Literary London is buzzing with reactions to the harsh and patronizing review by A. N. Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement of a book with the title Enlightening, consisting of the letters from 1946 to 1960 of Isaiah Berlin, and edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes. Hatchet jobs like this are rarely printed. He judges Berlin to have been no sort of philosopher but merely a lightweight historian of ideas whose best book, The Hedgehog and the Fox, survives as “an after-dinner game.” In these letters realistically but ludicrously he was dictating streams of malice about his academic colleagues; he was self-important, finally “malicious, snobbish, boastful, cowardly, pompous.” Somewhat contradictorily, Wilson thinks that the letters are “thunderingly boring” and not worth the effort required of them.

Now the editors of these letters wrote in to the TLS to concede that Berlin was no saint, but they took issue with Wilson’s “bizarre and petulant judgements,” correcting many errors of his. In the Spectator, in contrast, Paul Johnson praised the book, ending “thanks be to God” that another volume of letters would follow.

The one issue that really mattered to Berlin — and he made no secret of it — was his Jewishness. He was a Zionist through and through. Chaim Weizmaann was a friend and correspondent. We find David Ben Gurion calling on him, and asking him for definitions of being Jewish. We also find many observations about Israel and people living there. Although certainly disliking controversy, he was still prepared to confront critics of Israel or blinkered Arabists like E. L. Hodgkin and Harold Beeley.

Wilson wrote a biography praising Hilaire Belloc, one of the premier Jew-baiters of his day, a man who believed that the Bolshevik revolution was a conspiracy of Jews. Wilson has several times proclaimed in print the intelligence of Diana Mosley, the wife of the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and an unreconstructed Nazi to the end of her days. He has also copied word for word in a column of his the anti-Israeli remarks of an American Holocaust denier, he has asserted that the creation of the state of Israel was a historic mistake, and signed letters in the press about the supposed mischief of Israeli policy. Can anyone see a pattern that would explain his rubbishing of Berlin?