Bertrand Russell is best known to the general public as a political writer and activist, and to the learned world as a mathematician and philosopher. In the former role he was famous, or perhaps notorious; in the latter he was one of the most distinguished men of the twentieth century. It is not at all surprising that Russell's more specialized works in mathematics, philosophy, and politics have overshadowed what is of general interest and may be considered as literature. He was, however, one of the best essayists of his period.

Russell's career was abnormally long. Few writers have the opportunity to write a new preface for a book composed seventy years before, as Russell did for German Social Democracy (published in 1896 and 1965), and presumably no other critic of the Vietnam War of the late 1960s was able to approach it with memories of the British-Afghan war of 1878. Russell's...