He is a superb communicator of complex concepts with an eye for the arresting fact. The 70-year-old academic, who scandalised his peers by setting up an independent undergraduate college in London a few years ago, has a masterly appreciation of the currents of western philosophical thought, especially the Anglo-American tradition. AC Grayling appears well qualified under all three headings. Trying to outdo Russell, then, requires not just considerable brainpower and a way with words but also a bit of an ego.
The book is rarely read from cover to cover and it’s full of head-spinning digressions but Russell won a Nobel Prize in Literature partly on the strength of it, and it remains de rigueur on the shelves of any respectable intellectual. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy looms over his academic successors in the same way James Joyce’s Ulysses overshadows novelists.
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