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Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 and died in 1970, heir to the nineteenth-century liberal tradition: his grandfather, Lord John Russell, had been Prime Minister and his godfather was John Stuart Mill. In his long life spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries he became a renowned and controversial philosopher, atheist, publicist and political reformer. He is perhaps, the most famous and most passionate rationalist of the century, he is a polymath whose gifts lay in clear and …

…publicize his views on religion without fear of imprisonment and without too much vilification of his personality. He was passionately concerned with the future of a world in which it was impossible to be as optimistic about human nature or the charity of the natural world as the Enlightenment philosophers had been. Looking back on his life at the end of his Autobiography he commented on the ferocity of twentieth-century wars and twentieth-century ideologies (Hogan).