Duelling new English-language versions of the 1870s novel “Anna Karenina” are raising questions about the novelist Leo Tolstoy’s complex and contradictory attitudes toward Jews. Placed by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” among the foxes (who know many things) as opposed to the hedgehog (who knows one big…
‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Rarely have so few words — a fragment of poetry from the sixth-century Greek poet Archilochus — come to mean so much. Sixty years ago, with the publication of his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin yoked these little critters to…
The poet W. H. Auden once remarked that hearing gourmets describe favorite meals made him wish he could live on pills, and reading the memoirs of some art collectors describing their acquisitions can make one want to live sans art. An exception to this trend is the art connoisseur Michel Strauss, born in France in…
The iPad is a fox. In his book about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Sir Isaiah Berlin famously quoted a fragment of Archilochus who distinguishes between fox and hedgehog: “The fox knows many little things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.” The former (like Tolstoy) were cunning whereas the latter (Dostoevsky) were utterly effective. Both had their…
Commemorations continue apace for the hundredth birthday of the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). Born in Riga to a Russian Jewish family, he is being honored by the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Toronto (Sept 3-6); a Harvard conference from September 25-26 and other academic events. Yet much remains also for general…
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