On the final page of this fascinating book, David Caute mentions that in May 1966 the veteran Marxist scholar and campaigner Isaac Deutscher spoke at an anti-Vietnam War teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley. By chance this reviewer, there on a short visit, was in the audience. Leaving the faculty club in the late afternoon sunshine, I��found myself in a huge and excited crowd surrounding the campus’ central campanile, where an impassioned orator was performing from a small podium. Short, vigorous, with an aggressive goatee, Deutscher was delivering an encyclopedic survey of the prospects for world revolution: the sort of interminable progress report, I thought, with which Grigori Zinoviev would have harangued the Communist International. After an hour I had to leave, but a final look back across campus as the light faded left a lasting impression of a revolutionary firebrand, arms (and beard) still gesticulating, irresistibly recalling jerky black and white images of Lenin or Trotsky in action.

This charismatic crowd-puller, as Caute observes, was by now not only the author of substantial academic studies of Stalin and Trotsky, but also “a public celebrity, a tribune”, someone “born to write, to announce his views, to propagate his prophesies – to be himself”. Three years before that day at Berkeley, the newly founded University of Sussex had nearly appointed Deutscher to a professorship. This book explains why and how a more established scholar, with equally passionate but diametrically opposed views and a very different way of operating, played a decisive part in preventing that appointment.

Would the travelling prophet of protest and revolution have fitted into the ‘hidden-away routines of a very small, new university’?

Superficially, Deutscher (1907-1967) and Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) had a fair amount in common. Similar in age, they shared an East European Jewish background of a non-believing but powerful kind whose influence never left them. Both migrated to the UK (Berlin aged 11, Deutscher in his thirties) and both, in remarkable literary outputs, achieved stylistic distinction in a language other than their native one. But Deutscher’s and Berlin’s life courses, and their political and other views, were in stark contrast.

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Berlin began life in a prosperous merchant family in tsarist Russia, with parents who emigrated to the��West in 1920 to escape Bolshevism: throughout his life, he regarded the Soviet Union as the epitome of evil, and was preoccupied by the fate of relatives still living there. Prodigiously gifted, he sailed through St Paul’s School to the University of Oxford, which provided him with a secure and prestigious base (or rather an escalating series of them) for the rest of his life.

Deutscher’s experience could scarcely have been more different: born in Austrian-ruled Polish Galicia, he grew up in the anti-Semitic Polish Republic headed by Marshall Józef Piłsudski. Without formal academic training or qualifications, he wrote prolifically, first for Jewish publications, then (having steeped himself in Marxism) for the central organ of the clandestine Polish Communist Party, which he joined in 19. Expelled from the party in 1932, he was associated with Trotsky, although he opposed (for tactical reasons) the creation of the Trotskyite Fourth International in 1938. Reaching London just before war broke out, he worked for the exiled Polish government and then joined the staff of �ճ���������DzԴdz�������, as well as writing for �ճ������������������ and other papers. While supporting himself – sometimes precariously – by journalism, he wrote his substantial life of Stalin, a three-volume life of Trotsky and other works. He acquired an international reputation and was in growing demand in the US academy as a visiting professor and – increasingly – as a political campaigner. He never held a regular academic appointment.

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Caute shows his mastery of the history of ideas as well as his gift for biography in dissecting, chapter by chapter, the dozen or more issues on which Berlin’s and Deutscher’s views were irreconcilable. Marxism, for instance, was for Deutscher a scientific guide to humanity’s history and prospects, whereas Berlin saw it as representing the egregious fallacy that any all-embracing doctrine or vision can be valid. For Berlin, the USSR was an irredeemably totalitarian regime led by evil dictators, whereas Deutscher saw it as a system that had immeasurably benefited Russia and whose evolution towards democracy and freedom he constantly prophesied. On the state of Israel, the two also differed: Berlin felt a deep attachment, whereas Deutscher saw it as a mistake, a distraction from socialism, built on Jewish expropriation from a million Arab refugees. The two men’s differences extended from the philosophy of history to the question of responsibility for the Cold War and the merits of works of literature (Berlin greatly admired Boris Pasternak, whereas Deutscher despised him). There was also a specific incident that rankled with Berlin: in 1955, Deutscher wrote a sardonic and even brutal review of Berlin’s important work, Historical Inevitability. But behind these intellectual disagreements there lay, on Berlin’s side, something deeper. In a letter of 1959, he wrote of Deutscher, in the kind of terms he used often: “I��suffer from a profound, perhaps exaggerated antipathy to all his writings – I think him specious, dishonest, and in any case possessed of some quality which causes some kind of nausea within me.”

This was the context in which John Fulton, Sussex’s first vice-chancellor, wrote in February 1963 to Berlin, by now Sir Isaiah and an influential member of the university’s academic advisory committee, asking for his opinion on Sussex’s strong wish to appoint Deutscher to a chair in Soviet studies. During the convoluted sequence of events that followed, carefully disentangled and evaluated by Caute, it was clearly Berlin’s reply, accusing Deutscher of a “lack of scruple” and calling him “the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable”, that delivered the fatal blow to the proposal.

In conclusion, Caute raises a��new and pertinent question: would the world-renowned travelling prophet of protest and revolution have fitted into “the undramatic, hidden-away routines of a very small, new university with only (at that time) about five hundred students”? Sussex agreed in principle to Deutscher’s wish, for family and research reasons, to continue to live in London, but he in turn agreed, under pressure, to do the 12 hours a week of tutorial teaching that the dean, Martin Wight, explained was the norm expected of the whole teaching faculty. (In practice, some of us were doing as much as 16 hours.) But how balanced would Deutscher’s teaching have been? What would his Soviet studies reading list have looked like? And how would the new professor have coped with the demands of liaising with colleagues, vetting student candidates, marking exams, supervising theses, sitting on committees, writing recommendations and the rest of it?

As Caute puts it, “if we leave aside Isaiah Berlin’s motives, he may have done the University of Sussex, and its students, a small favour”. In any case, Caute’s book will make a lasting contribution to our knowledge of the lives and actions of two remarkable figures of the Cold War era, perhaps particularly of the better known and more highly regarded one, Berlin. Indeed, Isaac and Isaiah has already become one of the very few secondary studies to get a footnote reference in the massive, just-published third volume of Berlin’s correspondence.