The History of Ideas by Berlin

Leading figure in postwell oxford was john austin. But he didn't want to do the hard work of eliciting fine distinctions that competent speakers can draw, for example, between in error and by mistake. The last thing you can say of the way berlin tackled the history of ideas is that he played down excitement and human interest in favour of getting the footnotes right. Any half awake, but moderately literate t naje reading these at the end of the 19 fifties would rightly have been breathless.