Bertrand Russell: The Spirit Of Solitude
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Poor
Jacket: Very good
Pages: FEP missing
Condition remarks: Note: fep missing, damaged front pastedown - otherwise internally sound. Clean and bright copy.
At the intersection of towering intellect and profound loneliness stands Bertrand Russell, one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and contradictory minds — and Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude presents an unflinching portrait of the man behind the mathematics and the philosophy. Covering the first fifty-seven years of Russell's life, from his privileged but emotionally desolate Victorian childhood through his groundbreaking work in logic and his scandalous personal affairs, Monk chronicles a restless genius perpetually at war with himself and the world around him. The biography details Russell's monumental intellectual achievements — including his collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead on Principia Mathematica — alongside his tortured relationships with women, his passionate pacifism during the First World War, and his recurring bouts of near-suicidal despair. Monk, already celebrated for his definitive life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, brings the same forensic empathy and narrative authority to Russell, arguing that the great philosopher's public brilliance was inseparable from a deeply private anguish. The writing is precise yet richly human, illuminating how Russell's abstract pursuit of logical certainty was, in many ways, a flight from the emotional chaos that defined his inner life. A biography of rare psychological depth and intellectual rigour, it leaves the reader haunted by the question of what price genius truly demands.
Author: Ray Monk
Format: Hardback
Published: 1996, Jonathan Cape
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Poor
Jacket: Very good
Pages: FEP missing
Condition remarks: Note: fep missing, damaged front pastedown - otherwise internally sound. Clean and bright copy.
At the intersection of towering intellect and profound loneliness stands Bertrand Russell, one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and contradictory minds — and Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude presents an unflinching portrait of the man behind the mathematics and the philosophy. Covering the first fifty-seven years of Russell's life, from his privileged but emotionally desolate Victorian childhood through his groundbreaking work in logic and his scandalous personal affairs, Monk chronicles a restless genius perpetually at war with himself and the world around him. The biography details Russell's monumental intellectual achievements — including his collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead on Principia Mathematica — alongside his tortured relationships with women, his passionate pacifism during the First World War, and his recurring bouts of near-suicidal despair. Monk, already celebrated for his definitive life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, brings the same forensic empathy and narrative authority to Russell, arguing that the great philosopher's public brilliance was inseparable from a deeply private anguish. The writing is precise yet richly human, illuminating how Russell's abstract pursuit of logical certainty was, in many ways, a flight from the emotional chaos that defined his inner life. A biography of rare psychological depth and intellectual rigour, it leaves the reader haunted by the question of what price genius truly demands.