His grandfather met Napoleon at Elba. A conversation with BR at age eighty, in 1952. I found it very interesting, thought provoking :
https://youtu.be/xL_sMXfzzyA?t=33
I had thought BR was a pacifist during WWII. It was, rather, WWI - a far more defensible proposition..
He was part of a group of logicians and mathematicians that wanted to formally show that everything in mathematics is provable. He and another mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, authored a treatise titled Principia Mathematica, that required 379 pages to prove that 1+1=2. Then their dreams were dashed by another logician and mathematician named Kurt Friedrich Gödel who proved that mathematics will always be incomplete:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. His most influential contributions include his championing of logicism (the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic), his refining of Gottlob Frege’s predicate calculus (which still forms the basis of most contemporary systems of logic), his defense of neutral monism (the view that the world consists of just one type of substance which is neither exclusively mental nor exclusively physical), and his theories of definite descriptions, logical atomism and logical types.
Together with G.E. Moore, Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of modern analytic philosophy. His famous paradox, theory of types and work with A.N. Whitehead on Principia Mathematica invigorated the study of logic throughout the twentieth century (Schilpp 1944,xiii; Wilczek 2010, 74). In the public mind, he was famous as much for his evangelical atheism as for his contributions to technical philosophy.
Over the course of a long career, Russell also made important contributions to a broad range of subjects, including ethics, politics, educational theory & religious studies, cheerfully ignoring Hooke’s admonition to the Royal Society against “meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick” (Kreisel 1973, 24). Generations of general readers have also benefited from his popular writings on a wide variety of topics in both the humanities and the natural sciences. Like Voltaire, to whom he has been compared (Times of London 1970, 12), he wrote with style and wit and had enormous influence.
After a life marked by controversy – including dismissals from both Trinity College, Cambridge, and City College, New York – Russell was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell