Abstract
‘Poor Bertie’ Beatrice Webb wrote after receiving a visit from Bertrand Russell in
1931, ‘he has made a mess of his life and he knows it’. In the 1931 version of his
Autobiography, Russell himself seemed to share Webb’s estimate of his
achievements. Emotionally, intellectually and politically, he wrote, his life had been a
failure. This sense of failure pervades the second volume of Ray Monk’s engrossing
and insightful biography. At its heart is the failure of Russell’s marriages to Dora
Black and Patricia (Peter) Spence, his poor relationships with his children John and
Kate, and the decline in his reputation as a philosopher. Russell, who had changed the
direction of philosophy irrevocably, was in later years unable to find permanent
academic employment in Britain, ousted from his professorship at the City College of
New York because of his views on sex and marriage, and was reduced to giving nonspecialist
lectures at a foundation established by the Philadelphia philanthropist Albert
C. Barnes. Eventually in 1944 he returned to Cambridge, but by then the
philosophical world was in the grip of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas, and Russell was
largely ignored.