The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: Private Years 1884-1914 v. 1 - Hardcover

Griffin, Nicholas (Edited By)

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9780713990232: The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: Private Years 1884-1914 v. 1

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713990236 ISBN 13: 9780713990232

Publisher: Allen Lane/The Penquin Press, 1992

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'When we are young we have most of us a spring of enthusiasm and hope and self-confidence which helps us through periods of dullness: but later in life, if the dullness settles down as the normal state of things, it must become almost impossible to preserve our energy and our generosity. And nothing on earth makes people so unsympathetic as solitude.' So wrote Bertrand Russell in 1893 to the woman who was to become his first wife. Those who knew Russell at the turn of the century referred to him as 'the Day of Judgement'. The nickname suggests a good deal about the man: the extraordinary vigour and precision of his mind; the speed with which he came to conclusions; the absoluteness and impartiality of his assessments; a degree of moral earnestness sometimes amounting to priggery; and a tendency to see the world in black and white. Even for his friends he could be an alarming person to come up against. Yet he was also a man of strong and sometimes conflicting emotions. He was often acutely lonely and, as a youth, extremely shy. He overcame his shyness by force of will, and he sought to overcome his loneliness, never quite successfully until in old age, in a series of passionate friendships and love affairs. In this first of two volumes the letters, all (with one exception) previously unpublished, reveal these various sides of Russell's personality with a directness not found anywhere else. They cover every aspect of his life until the outbreak of the First World War.

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