The film traces the intellectual development of Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) a leading thinker in the context of his life and times, through archival film and recordings of its subject, as well as interviews with his biographer Michael Ignatieff, his principal editor Henry Hardy, and pianist and writer Alfred Brendel, and others. After Isaiah Berlin’s encounter with Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in 1945, he shifts from analytic philosophy to the history of ideas and develops his concepts of Liberty. Berlin and others speak of his other principle works: “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, his study of Tolstoy; Alexander Herzen; the effects of Romanticism.