This book is a Laurel-and-Hardy scenario, read out by a Methodist lay preacher. Everything has gone into it, and it is very long; another volume is promised, because this one stops when Russell is fifty, in 1921, and there is more surrealism to come. It is a life that began in 1872 (Monk spares us ‘heyday of the Victorian Empire’) and moves from John Stuart Mill to Lenin. Russell is, by turns, reluctant junior diplomat in Paris (he did not like the French), student of German socialism, advocate of women’s rights, almost-politician, semi-pacifist convict, professor in China.

The thin man in the scenario is a descendant of (Monk would probably say ‘illustrious’) Whig Bedfords, becomes Fellow of Trinity, writes work on mathematical logic, visits people in ‘luxurious homes’, and could very easily have turned towards that devastating omniscience and horn-rimmed refinement that George Orwell hated in such people. The thin man was dandled on the knee of Lord John Russell and sucked in gusts of that bleak Edinburgh Enlightenment from John Stuart Mill, preaching that life consists of sensation and then proceeding never to have any. There is an ultra-religious household, dominated by a grandmother surrounded by emotional wreckages of relatives, to whom the thin-man Russell makes appropriate noises, while, even at a tender age, the fat man is furiously rebellious inside. The thin man made an awful marriage to ‘Alys’, and stuck to it for childless years. The world of besandalled vegetarianism is not far off, as the two of them address each other as ‘thee’, and you begin to understand that otherwise excruciating book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The thin man wrote a book, Principia Mathematica, which, as I understand it, is a very Anglican effort to rationalise the unknowable. It is also interesting, since it shows that ideas about atoms and relativity were coming up through pure mathematics, quite independently, at a time when most physicists thought that they had discovered all that was to be known. Perhaps Russell’s later, passionate, hatred of the atomic bomb owed something to resentment that physicists had simply joined up the dotted lines mathematicians had sketched out fifty years before.

But there was also a fat man, perpetually tripping over buckets of paint and making an ass of himself as Lady Ottoline’s lover. By 1911, aged nearly forty, Russell had had enough of the bicycles and long-bottomed-knicker progressivism of Alys, and he took up with Lady Ottoline Morrell. She would not abandon her husband, who was a very good friend, and so the affair went on, with more excruciation, all of it written up in letters which have been preserved (in enormous numbers) in archives in North America. The Peter Cook parody, ‘I fell in love with Lady Utterly Immorell and we decided to become intimate the following Thursday’, had the spirit of this (Monk has no sense of humour). The collision with Lady O Morrell’s world knocked Russell clean out of his orbit, and launched him onto that famously erratic course which led to arrest, aged ninety, for sitting down in Trafalgar Square over CND. There was, at that time, a huge amount of pot-boiling, but Russell can be forgiven everything for writing that very, very good book, A History of Western Philosophy. The principle of hereditary peerage is also quite defensible because of his other achievement: his son, Conrad, named after his godfather Joseph Conrad, and a true defender of our liberties against the bureaucrats and the goody-goodies.

There is one splendidly surreal moment in this book when Keynes and D H Lawrence come for breakfast to Russell’s rooms in Nevile’s Court, Trinity. It was not a success: each disliked the others, and in any case it was a grotesquely silly idea to expect three such men to have anything to say to each other at any time, particularly at breakfast. Lawrence wandered off, hating the superego; Keynes wandered off, hating the id; Russell switched over very firmly to the ego. The problem with him, after his marriage to Dora, is that he had nothing very much to say to a world which had moved beyond Edwardian progressivism. (H G Wells, whose splendid biography by Michael Foot I have also been reading, suffered from the same problem, as perhaps the country as a whole did.)

Is there any room for another Bertrand Russell biography? There is, after all, the autobiography, which is frank enough, in the end depressing, and needing correction in detail (as, to be fair, Monk shows). Ronald Clark wrote a good biography twenty years ago. True, these books do not mine the extinct volcano of love affairs of long ago, as Monk does, but I am not convinced that we are very much the richer for more details of that kind.

There is, for instance, a ghastly account of the inexperienced Alys and the very reluctant Bertie trying, as the saying goes, to squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube of their marriage. It reminded me of the passage in Bel Ami where ‘quand elle lui disait “mon bébé” il avait envie de lui dire “ma vieille”‘, and I had rather read Maupassant. Of course there is room for another book on Russell, but it would have to be far more interpretative than this one, and far less ploddingly written. In Ray Monk’s book is a humourless fat man, and its thin man is far too stoutly imprisoned.