ISAIAH BERLIN, POLITICAL THEORIST.

Byline: Associated Press

Sir Isaiah Berlin, a giant in 20th-century thought who specialized in the history of political ideas and the concepts of liberty, has died at the age of 88.

Berlin was remembered fondly Thursday as a raconteur who talked impossibly fast in a half-dozen languages, a lecturer who absorbed audiences across the world and a man who ``reshaped political philosophy.''

He died Wednesday night at Oxford's Acland Hospital, according to Oxford University, where he had served for more than 60 years as a lecturer, professor and college president. No other details were released.

A Latvian-born liberal and a committed anti-Communist, Berlin examined the development of liberal and totalitarian ideas, wrote on Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, on opera and on Russian literature.

He wrote an admired book on Karl Marx in 1939, but most of his work was devoted to essays - most notably ``The Hedgehog and the Fox'' in 1953 and 1964's ``Mr. Churchill in 1940.''

In the former, he ruminated on a line from the Greek poet Archilochus that says, ``The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.''

``Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense,'' Berlin wrote. ``But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.''

Gerard Cohen, the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, said Thursday that Berlin ``reshaped political philosophy'' with his strenuous examinations of liberty.

``He could explain why it was that civilizations so distinct and opposed - for example, the United States and the Soviet Union - could both think that they were promoting freedom,'' Cohen said.

At the same time, he said, Berlin ``was a man who was more alive than anyone else I've ever known - rich or poor, educated or not, man or woman. He loved life. He radiated life out from himself.

During World War II, Berlin worked at the British Embassy in Washington, producing a weekly summary of U.S. opinion that was said to be Winston Churchill's favorite reading.

Berlin enjoyed telling a story about Churchill, who invited Irving Berlin, the American composer of ``White Christmas,'' to lunch in 1944, thinking his guest was Isaiah Berlin. Churchill kept up an awkward and comical conversation throughout the meal, not discovering the truth until his wife informed him afterward.

After the war and back at Oxford, Berlin turned from pure philosophy to the history of ideas. He is credited with establishing the academic disciplines of intellectual history and political theory.

In 1956, he married Aline de Gunzbourg, a one-time French golf champion who survives him. He had three stepsons.

Berlin, once described as possessing a ``huge liquid voice like a melting Russian river in spring,'' lectured at many U.S. universities and was professor of Humanities at the City University of New York from 1966 to 1971. He was a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Institute of Arts and Letters.

He was president of the Royal Academy from 1974 to 1978, was knighted in 1957, and was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II to the prestigious Order of Merit in 1971.

``Isaiah Berlin has defended and promoted the culture of freedom with more insight, persuasiveness and brilliance than any other contemporary thinker, and he has shown in his writings and by example that passion for freedom also means tolerance, compassion and understanding for one's adversaries,'' Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in a 1994 birthday tribute.