SOURCE: “A Glamorous Salon,” in Encounter, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, October, 1974, pp. 67-72.

In the following essay, Ryan describes the style and the substance of Berlin's work in the history of ideas.

At the very first lecture I ever attended as an undergraduate a clever voice behind me remarked, “Lectures have been obsolete since Gutenberg; it's typical that Oxford hasn't noticed yet.” Since I, if pressed, would have guessed that Gutenberg was somewhere in Sweden, I was relieved to discover that the clever voice had borrowed the joke from a previous night's speaker at the Union—John Wain, I think. I discovered almost as quickly that the Gutenberg revolution had reached Oxford. Lectures were sparsely attended, and libraries were over-crowded, for undergraduates had found out that the printed word stuck in the mind more readily than did the spoken word.

None the less, some lecturers could attract large audiences...