The Popper Study of My Kind, or, The Open Sesame and Its Enemy, or, The Poverty of His Story: A Schism, or, Le philosophe se parle à lui-même, or, Karl Bühler's Day Off
M ichael Ignatieff in 1998, round the time of his Isaiah Berlin biography, in the closing passage of a public colloquy at Berkeley with two of the leading literary lights on the faculty, the Hebraist Robert Alter and Michael André Bernstein: "I don't mean to cast aspersion on Popper, who was a great man, but I once went to interview him for British television. And Popper was in his late 80s/early 90s, and he greeted me at the door in a kind of blue running suit and Nike trainers, a tiny little man, like a sort of bantam cock, and he says, 'So pleased to see you. I am ready for your interview. Here are your questions.' [laughter] "I'm not kidding. He had written up on longhand, which I will treasure and sell for a vast price, an eighteen-page interview including all 'my' questions and all his answers. All I had to do was turn on the tape recorder and we would rea...
