From personal conversations with Berlin, I can confirm not only his dislike for Marxist "cosmopolitans" like Deutscher but also for those intellectuals like Arthur Koestler who sought to purge Jewish "otherness" by insisting Jews either emigrate to Israel or totally assimilate. Berlin was far too conscious of his own multiple identities — Russian, English, and Jewish — to accept such coercive choices. Zionism, for Berlin, was psychologically important precisely as a corrective to the neuroses, "abnormalities" and dualities that he felt burdened the Jewish condition in exile, but it was not the solution for all Jews.

Caute's book is at its most compelling in his dissection of the Cold War battles of the intellectuals. He is sharply critical of Deutscher for turning a blind eye to the Stalinist purges, the Gulag, and the post-Stalin thaw. The same blind spot, he emphasises, also affected Deutscher's idealised perception of Lenin and the October Revolution as a grandiose "progressive" achievement. The same objections could, of course, be made against E.H. Carr (with whom Berlin remained on good terms), Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. Berlin, uprooted and traumatised as a youngster by the events of 1917, was completely free of such illusions. His 1945 visit to Soviet Russia had left an ineradicable mark, enabling him concretely to grasp the ravages of Stalinist terror against the classical Russian culture of which he was so enamoured. Berlin's empathy with the great Russian poet and novelist, Boris Pasternak (regarded with contempt by Deutscher as a renegade), shows just how far apart Caute's two protagonists remained.

Naturally, these differences do not justify Berlin's action in vetoing Deutscher's academic prospects 50 years ago — something about which he may have felt some twinge of remorse. Caute is, on the whole, reasonably balanced and not overly judgmental in his account of this lapse. Wisely, he uses it essentially as a backdrop for vividly depicting the broader issues at stake in the never-ending dilemma of how to reconcile democratic freedoms with radical social change.