Berlin understands how compromise and self-deception work in the public sphere, how, for the most statesmen, “personal motives were inextricably connected with, at the lowest, conceptions of political expediency and, at the highest, to a pure and disinterested public ideal.”
He is fascinated equally by the kind of politicians who “possess antennae of the greatest possible delicacy” and the kind who rule through “concentration of willpower, directness and strength.” FDR is his shining example of the first type, Churchill of the second.