One litmus test for a successful public intellectual is an indelible YouTube presence. The late Christopher Hitchens passes this test. As do Noam Chomsky and Jordan Peterson. Of course, it helps if you were alive within the past 50 years, which makes it all the more extraordinary that someone born in 1872 and died in 1970 passes too: Bertrand Russell.
There is a 1952 video of Russell, in his gentlemanly pomp, being interviewed in his home by an American journalist. There is a 1961 audio interview with John Chandos that lasts for nearly two hours, in which Russell calls DH Lawrence a “fascist”, describes George Bernard Shaw as a “very cruel man” and unfavourably compares Vladimir Lenin to Oliver Cromwell. Aside from Cromwell, of course, Russell had met and spoken to all these men.
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