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book and on Freedom and Organization Russell had the assistance of a young woman who had previously taught at his school, and who had become first his lover and then, in 1936, his third wife: Patricia (commonly called ‘Peter’) Spence. In 1937 they had a son, Conrad. They moved to a house near Oxford where Russell gave a course of lectures and held discussions with some of the younger philosophers, among them A. J. Ayer. He published Power, A New Social Analysis in 1938, and his Oxford lectures, at first entitled ‘Words and Facts’, became his next philosophical book, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth , published in 1940.
    In 1938 Russell went with Peter and Conrad to America to take up an appointment as visiting professor at the University of Chicago. Although he had stimulating conversations there with brilliant students and colleagues – among the latter Rudolf Carnap – he did not get on with the head of the philosophy department, and he disliked Chicago, which he described as ‘a beastly town with vile weather’. At the end of the year the Russells went to California, where the weather proved altogether more congenial. Russell taught at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In the summer of 1939 John and Kate came to spend a Californian holiday, but the outbreak of war made it impossible for them to return to England, so Russell placed them both in UCLA.
    Despite the sunshine he was less happy at UCLA than he had been at Chicago, because the staff and students were not very able and the president of the University seemed to Russell especially disagreeable. After a year, therefore, he accepted an invitation to become a professor at the City College of New York. But before he could assume his post a scandal was raised against him on the grounds of irreligion and immorality. It was started by an Episcopalian bishop, carried forward enthusiastically by Catholics, and achieved focus in a legal suit brought by the mother of an intending female student of the College. The mother, a Mrs Kay, said that Russell’s presence in the College would be dangerous to her daughter’s virtue. Russell was unable to plead in court because the suit was brought against the Municipality of New York and he was not himself a party to it. Mrs Kay’s lawyer described Russell’s works as ‘lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fibre’. One of the grounds for this was that Russell had stated in a book that very young children should not be punished for masturbating. The Irish Catholic judge was even more vituperative in his summing up against Russell than Mrs Kay’s lawyer had been. Mrs Kay, naturally, won.
    The case raised not just the whole of New York City and State against Russell, but the whole country. Driven from his New York job, he could at first find nowhere else that would give him a teaching post, and no newspaper that would offer him a column. Because of war conditions it was impossible to get money from England. He was thus stranded abroad without a livelihood, and with a family to support.
    Russell was rescued from this dilemma first by Harvard University, which generously invited him to lecture in 1940, and then by a Philadelphia millionaire, Dr Barnes, a passionate collector of art who had established a Foundation for the study chiefly of art history. He gave Russell a fiveyear contract to lecture at the Foundation. To his amusement, and despite thinking it incongruous with academic philosophy, Russell gave his lectures in a room hung with French paintings of nudes. Barnes was something of an eccentric with a reputation for falling out with his staff; less than halfway through Russell’s term he suddenly issued a dismissal notice on the grounds that, in his opinion, Russell’s lectures were poorly prepared. These lectures were subsequently published as A History of Western Philosophy , by far Russell’s most