A series of talks by Bertrand Russell, O.M.

When Bertrand Russell went up to Cambridge in the nineties, eccentricity throve among the dons. 'Incompetence, oddity, and even insanity were not objected to,' he says. 'Very good men flourished, and so did some who were not so good. But in spite of lunacy and laziness, it was a good place, where independence of mind could exist undeterred.' In the first of this new group of six talks Bertrand Russell recalls some of the more remarkable figures in the Cambridge of sixty years ago.