Bertie and Alys and Ottoline

Alan Ryan

  • The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell. Vol. I: The Private Years, 1884-1914 edited by Nicholas Griffin
    Allen Lane, 553 pp, £25.00, March 1992, ISBN 0 7139 9023 6

Bertrand Russell has been dead for twenty years, but his ability to arouse strong emotions seems undiminished. The Economist’s reviewer of these letters – perhaps carried away by pre-election anxiety – offered the opinion that Russell was ‘a moral dwarf’, while others have commented pretty sharply on the disparity between the honesty with which Russell faced the ruin of his intellectual projects and the duplicity and self-deception of his marital and extra-marital dealings.

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