The essay could also be updated in the light of more recent findings. Exploring those murky events warrants a dedicated blog later in I shall update the Commonplace files on my return. A happy seasonal festival to all my readers! December 12, December Commonplace entries duly posted here. December One of the more bizarre episodes in the life of the great intellectual historian Sir Isaiah Berlin occurred when Guy Burgess invited him to join him on a trip to the Soviet Union in the summer of Burgess, probably anxious to make contact with his spymasters after the purging of the London station, had persuaded his mentor Harold Nicolson that Berlin, a native Russian speaker, should be appointed as press officer at the embassy in Moscow.
Was Berlin merely a cover? Did Burgess have other motives for enticing Berlin to Russia? Maybe β but Berlin was in any case eager to fulfill a long-time desire to visit the Soviet Union.
They never completed the journey. In New York, Burgess received the news that he was to be recalled to London. There, in the treatment of agents under a cloud, lay a key difference between the West and Soviet Russia: in Moscow, a bullet in the back of the head; in London, a transfer to the BBC.
Adapting to circumstances, he quickly earned a reputation for his deft analysis of the American scene, and through the British Embassy was offered a semi-permanent job with the British Press Service.
While successful in this role, Berlin wanted to return to the United Kingdom first, one strong reason he gave his biographer being that he was did not want to be thought cowardly in avoiding the Blitz back in England. Was this desire not to end up as a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel, like the elopers Auden and Isherwood, whom Waugh so sharply lampooned as Parsnip and Pimpernel, some neat retrospective insight? Put Out More Flags did not appear until But cold-blooded flight is monstrous.
