- Founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
- Received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
- Narrator for the ABC-BBC radio production of "Living in an Atomic Age" (1953).
- Famous philosopher and author of books on the foundations of mathematics, the development of contemporary formal logic, and analytic philosophy. His contributions relating to mathematics include his discovery of Russell's Paradox, his defence of logicism (the view that mathematics is reducible to formal logic), his introduction of the theory of types, and his refining and popularizing of the first-order predicate calculus.
- Father of three children: John Conrad Russell and Katharine Jane Russell (with Dora Winifred Black); and Conrad Sebastian Robert Russell, the 5th Earl Russell (with Patricia (known as "Peter") Helen Spence).
- A militant atheist who nonetheless read the Bible every day, explaining that the oldest rule of strategy is "Know your enemy".
- In 1949, he was a passenger in a plane flying over Scandinavia. As a pipe smoker, he was asked to sit at the back, with the result that, when the plane crashed and nosedived into a fjord, he was not killed, as were the non-smoking passengers sitting at the front. He was rescued and lived for over twenty more years.
- Russell was taken by most critics to be the model for the protagonist of Peter Shaffer's play "The Battle of Shrivings" (first staged in 1970). This starred John Gielgud as an elderly philosopher who was taken up as a guru by much younger activists owing to his opposition to nuclear weapons.
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