 Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909 in Riga (then capital of the Govenorate of Livonia in the Russian Empire, now capital of Latvia), the only surviving child (after a stillborn daughter) of Mendel Berlin, a prosperous Russian Jewish timber merchant, and his wife Marie, née Volshonok. In 1915 the family moved to the forestry town of Andreapol (then in Russia’s Pskov Govenorate), and in 1916 to Petrograd (now St Petersburg), where they remained through both Russian Revolutions of 1917, which Isaiah would remember witnessing. Despite early harassment by the Bolsheviks, the family was permitted to return to Riga with Latvian citizenship in 1920; from there they emigrated, in 1921, to Britain. They lived first in suburban and then in central London; Isaiah attended St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied Greats (classical languages, ancient history, and philosophy) and PPE (philosophy, politics and economics), taking Firsts in both. In 1932 he was appointed to a lectureship at New College, and shortly afterwards became the first Jew to be elected to a Prize Fellowship at All Souls, considered one of the highest accolades in British academic life.