Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a Latvian-British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas, widely considered to be the dominant British scholar of his generation. He excelled as an essayist, conversationalist and raconteur, and was a brilliant lecturer who spontaneously improvised richly allusive and coherently structured material. In its obituary of the scholar, the Independent stated that "Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time... there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential".