"I have a very particular adolescent memory of coming upon Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. I remember, as I was a bookish adolescent, thinking that this was just the most exciting book I had ever come across. Dazzlingly written and with an extraordinary scale and scope. I remember settling down to read it and then beginning to take notes, which more or less consisted of copying the book out. It seemed to me a marvel, and if there’s one work that really made me feel I want to know more about this subject, it was that one." From an interview by The Art of Theory with Quentin Skinner. (Some other time I will critically discuss the evolution (and not) of his methodological views, which I have criticized here at NewAPPS.) But below the folk more on Skinner's admiration for Russell's History.
"One of the extraordinary achievements in that text, which simply reveals his remarkable literary skills is that he is brilliant at paraphrase, and you can read a paraphrase of his which is very accurate and yet is full of ridicule at the same time. And it would be wonderful to know how to do that—it’s quite unfair, of course. His sympathies are very easily engaged at the level of wanting to reproduce what someone has said, and he’s brilliant at doing that. But of course, at another level his sympathies may not be engaged at all."
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