That made Roosevelt, for Berlin, “the greatest leader of democracy, the greatest champion of social progress in the twentieth century.”32 So where did his self-confidence come from? Not, I’m sure, from any Polonius-like search for certainty in the shapes of passing clouds. But not from reconciling or eradicating contradictions either: FDR was at once too cynical and too humane to pursue either possibility. Perhaps he was, though, one of those leaders who’d “learnt to live,” as Berlin put it, and in the manner of Machiavelli, with “incompatible alternatives in public and private life.”33 “I am
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