Books, Arts & Manners

Bertrand Russell: A Political Life, by Alan Ryan (Farrar, Straus, 240 pp., $19.95)

Anyone who doubts William Buckley’s judgment that it would be better to be ruled by the first two hundred names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard had better read Alan Ryan’s Bertrand Russell: A Political Life. It shows what can happen when an analytical genius turns his hand to the human condition.