SOURCE: “The Liberal Mind,” in Encounter, Vol. LVI, No. 5, May, 1981, pp. 83-6.

In the following review of Personal Impressions, Quinton draws a picture of Berlin from an examination of Berlin's portraits of others.

Autobiographies are ordinarily the work of those who in certain crucial ways are unselfconscious, those who have no doubts about their own importance or interestingness, a state of mind that is the typical outcome of complete absence of a sense of humour. In the greatest autobiographies this is carried to a point of monstrosity, as in the cases of St Augustine and Rousseau, two of the most detestable human beings known to history. Cellini and Gibbon are considerably less awful, but they diffuse a chilling radiation of self-regard.

Memoirs, the record of what the subject observed rather than of what he felt and did, are the appropriate form for less self-worshipping, more self-critical spirits—for...