Conrad Russell on Bertrand Russell (with a pinch of Carly Simon)

In the 1 September 1988 issue of the London Review of Books, Conrad Russell reviewed Alan Ryan's "political life" of his father Bertrand Russell.

Here is a little personal reminiscence from that review:

My father’s situation in 1918 was not an enviable one: he was 46, and had just lost his job, suffered imprisonment and social disgrace, and was facing the failure of his marriage. He had, in effect, no inherited money left, and, it must have seemed, a very bleak future indeed. 

Many men have broken under stresses no greater than this, and that the writing which came out of it should sometimes have been done for effect is no more than, reasonably, we should have expected. 

His situation in 1941 was no more enviable: he was trapped in the United States by the outbreak of war, unable to get himself into England or his money out of it, again dismissed from an academic job in disgrace, and in difficulties even for money to pay the fare into New York to meet a publisher. 

I can still remember the day when Simon and Schuster came to lunch (and my own bewilderment that they turned out to be a single person), and the overwhelming relief in the household when they happily departed. The result was The History of Western Philosophy.

The whole review is worth reading. Conrad names the two greatest changes of his father's last time as the way it became safe not to be a Christian and the relaxation of sexual morality.

On a more trivial note, the publishing firm of Simon & Schuster was founded in 1924 in New York. The Simon was Richard L. Simon, who was the father of the singer and songwriter Carly Simon, but I don't suppose it was he who called on the Russells.