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“... had drawn his attention to a passage in James Kirkup’s autobiography, I, Of All People. ‘Ray Monk and others,’ he went on, ‘may be as intrigued as I was.’ The passage from Kirkup is as follows: ‘I was referred to specialists at the Ingham Infirmary in Westoe Road, and at the Newcastle Infirmary – where I had once spent a few days at ...”

“... A feeling has been growing that analytic philosophy is in crisis. Once proud and disdainful of other traditions, it has become unsure of itself; uncertain about its past and fearful of its future. One sign of this insecurity is the debate now being conducted among leading analytic philosophers about their own history. Previously, they cared little about this ...”

“... It may surprise those who do not already know it that the world centre for the study of the life and work of Bertrand Russell is at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Shortly before he died Russell sold his vast collection of manuscripts and personal papers to McMaster for a huge sum of money in order to finance the various projects of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation ...”

“... into either ‘left-hand-drive’ or ‘made in Japan’. It wasn’t like that in the days when Ray Monk ran the philosophy section of Waterstone’s on the Charing Cross Road. At the time, Monk was also writing his Life of Wittgenstein; these days he doesn’t need to work in a bookshop. Not so Robert Topping, for ...”

“... to the first volume of his biography of Russell, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, Ray Monk was clear, as his title indicated, about the story he had to tell, though also daunted by the amount of material he had to work with. The bibliography of Russell’s work lists more than three thousand publications, and this doesn’t include the ...”

“... the life, and there are crowded years ahead, though it is possible they may be less interesting. Ray Monk’s much-admired biography of Wittgenstein made one feel, for a while at any rate, that the subject’s weird ascetic life and his philosophy, which he himself felt sure no one would understand, could be represented as an intelligible whole. Now he ...”

“... Was Wittgenstein a spiritual as well as a philosophical genius? Ray Monk’s exceptionally fine and fat biography puts us in a better position to answer this question than we have been hitherto. Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein’s character is with the photographs that exist of his face ...”

“... of the atomic bomb’, was never openly remorseful. But he was nothing if not ambivalent, as Ray Monk makes clear in his superb biography. When the fireball burst Oppenheimer remembered the words from Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita: ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’ It was his own idiosyncratic translation, and it became his most famous ...”

“... to meet their curiosity, communicating their technical work with verve – as the biographers Ray Monk and Cheryl Misak have done.Kitcher is right, too, that synthetic philosophy gets short shrift. Philosophers are reluctant to offer world-formulas. This is due in part to humility, but it also reflects one of the pathologies Kitcher identifies. An ...”

“... is one answer, but it seems a more pointed thing than that. In Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius Ray Monk reports that as a child Wittgenstein was unusually compliant and solicitous of other people’s affection, even at the expense of the truth. Perhaps he was aware of this tendency in himself and felt compelled to resist it on every possible ...”

“... be true of illiteracy as opposed to literacy: if the difference between the two were unbridgeable, monk and peasant would have developed into different species. On Olson’s own analogy of mapmaking his theory might mean that nobody has yet got round to exploring anything, since we are still waiting for somebody to come up with the first map of the terrain. To ...”

“... were undertaken in close collaboration with his friend and former tutor, the naturalist John Ray. While a student at Cambridge Willughby had worked on Ray’s groundbreaking botanical studies and they later travelled extensively in Europe, collecting the books, images, curios and specimens that would form the basis of ...”

“... biography have been persuaded to contribute an epitome here – such as Roy Foster on Yeats or Ray Monk on Bertrand Russell – and some leading literary scholars have similarly written about their favourite critical subjects, such as Christopher Ricks on Tennyson or Marilyn Butler on Jane Austen. There are one or two notable absences among historians ...”

“... Spot Café, an artists’ hangout just off the Bowery, opened with Cecil Taylor, gave Thelonious Monk his first extended gig, and introduced New York to Ornette Coleman.) Many of the pieces in Inventing Downtown are proudly uncommercial. The exhibition includes work by a number of black and women painters, many of whom dropped out or were written out of ...”

“... goes: but it is left to the reader to try to fit the pieces together into an intelligible whole. Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein succeeded in bringing an enigmatic character to life, but Moorehead’s book leaves the real Russell just out of reach – a mere compilation of deeds and words. She seems not to be able to enter into Russell’s ...”