Rob C. Croes (ANEFO) · CC0

Berlin was born into a Russian-Jewish family in Riga and was six years old in Petrograd when he watched the Russian Revolution unfold in the street below his window; his family fled to England in 1921. He became a historian of ideas at Oxford, where he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory and later founding president of Wolfson College, known for improvised, digressive lectures that were more often recorded than written down. He was knighted in 1957 and won the Jerusalem Prize in 1979 for his lifelong defense of civil liberties.