Chuck G: "First of all Berlin really knew how to read literature. Then also there was his voice, upper class Englsh snobby voice, but in his case, perhaps deserved."
Definitely deserved: He was rich and Oxford trained. In other words, he couldn't help sounding like that. It's not an accident that one of the intersections he is focused on in the talk is the aristocratic coming into contact with radical thought and action...
In a way this was probably the apex of English speaking. Academics and pedants have always bemoaned the degradation of the English language, but since the rise of american empire, it has been degraded and Berlin's time was most probably the last gasp for what might be called the fullest use of the English lexicon. I could probably come up with a better phrase, but no time. Berlin was a branch of the tree that came up with the King James bible - not christians of course, but the upper class oxford people who never really stopped using the language in that very particular way...but his voice, yeah, it is like an upper-class twit parody. Very P.G. Wodehouse... Lovely.
Aloha,
J