He disliked England, and particularly Cambridge, where people could be heard saying “Oh, really” in a quite unacceptable way.

In Britain after the war, he was sometimes happy and at ease in Wales and staying in Ireland, where he found that people in the street smiled in an acceptable way. Ludwig was later to say that he was “German through and through,” and he quite naturally joined the Austrian Army at the outbreak of the Great War without any sense of divided loyalties.

From the middle of the nineteenth century onward the Wittgensteins no longer regarded themselves as Jewish. It is reported that the eight Wittgenstein children, of whom Ludwig was the youngest, enjoyed the services of twenty-four private tutors at one time. Wittgenstein was the youngest child of an immensely rich industrialist in Vienna, whose grandfather had been the originally Jewish land agent of the princely family of Seyn-Wittgenstein the agent took his employer’s name. The step-by-step unraveling of the mysteries over the years has certainly contributed to his fame and perhaps also to the continuing enchantments of his philosophy. It is an odd fact about Wittgenstein that his peculiar nature as a person, and his true ambitions as a philosopher, have only been gradually revealed to an inquiring public, who for many years were provoked to ever-increasing curiosity by the mysteries and rumors surrounding his reputation, mysteries that even extended to the name itself. He reports that he has had the full cooperation of Wittgenstein’s literary executors and he quotes freely from the more intimate and unphilosophical parts of Wittgenstein’s unpublished manuscripts. Ray Monk succeeds both with the life and with the doctrines and he is the first person to make entirely clear the substantial interaction between them. It is not easy to combine a continuous and intelligible story of a man’s life with a succinct account of his changing philosophical doctrines.

The duty of genius ray monk