Volume 39, Number 14 · August 13, 1992
Russell's Paradox
By Stuart Hampshire
The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell Volume 1, The Private Years, 1884-1914
edited by Nicholas Griffin
Houghton Mifflin, 553 pp., $35.00
The years between 1872 and 1914 are indeed 'the private years' of Bertrand Russell's long life, if they are compared with the period following 1914, the years of his militant pacifism and imprisonment for opposing World War I. But even during his lonely childhood in the splendid late Victorian house, Pembroke Lodge, of his grandfather Lord John Russell and his grandmother the formidable Lady Stanley, he learned to take for granted the daily arguments about great affairs of state among those who were directly or indirectly involved in them as members of the aristocratic ruling class; and this included his own family and his numerous cousins. It was naturally assumed that he would in due time appear on the public stage as a leader in liberal politics, and perhaps also as publicly supporting the most advanced radical causes as his parents, Lord and Lady Amberley, did before they prematurely died, of diphtheria.
Review, 4066 words
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