"There is no human being, no, not one, whom I do not hate," Mallako declares. "There is no being, no, not one, whom I do not wish to see suffering the extremity of torment." When he explains why he feels this "well of hatred", Mallako describes a childhood that is, in essence, Russell's.At the age of six, he says, he lost both his parents and was put into the care of a pious old lady, who "was persuaded that I was a good little boy She adopted me, and educated me. It is a perverted mental blood-lust."How near to the truth Lawrence came can be seen in a short story Russell wrote late in life called Satan in the Suburbs, the writing of which he said, was "a great release of my hitherto unexpressed feelings". As he himself once put it: "There is a well of fierce hate in me." One of the few people to see this was DH Lawrence, who once wrote to Russell with devastating insight and frankness. "You are too full of devilish repressions to be anything but lustful and cruel ... It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood. The central character in the story, Dr Mallako, might be seen as a literal personification of Lawrence's phrase "devilish repression".

His Uncle Willy had gone insane and, after murdering a complete stranger, had spent the rest of his life hidden away in an asylum. Russell did not know this until he was 21, and ever afterwards his very deepest fear was of reliving his uncle's fate. This fear, he wrote later, "caused me, for many years, to avoid all deep emotion and live, as nearly as I could, a life of intellect tempered by flippancy".Among the "mad dogs" that Russell considered unsafe to let loose were his often extraordinarily intense hatreds. I had thought possibly now I might let all the dogs have an outing, but some of them are mad dogs and are not safe to leave at large."The intense passion that Russell kept locked up was, he often thought, akin to madness and frequently, when emotionally aroused, he thought himself on the brink of insanity. "It doesn't do for me to relax too much," he once wrote to Ottoline, "the forces inside are too wild - some of them must be kept chained up ... His often desperate searches for love were a series of attempts to escape this spectral existence.But, just as there are advantages of keeping one's deepest thoughts and feelings hidden, so there are advantages in being untouchable, and counterbalancing Russell's dread of remaining in ghostly isolation was his fear of the forces within him that would be unleashed if he let himself be touched, if he made real contact with another. For much of his life Russell felt, as he often put it, like a ghost, a quasi-substantial being, unable to make real contact with the flesh-and-blood creatures around him.

When things with Ottoline started to go wrong, however, Russell would write to her about how he did not want to feel anything, he wanted only to think. At such times, he would return to abstruse and technical issues in philosophy and try to put his passionate love for Ottoline out of his mind.Linked to this pendulum-swing between abstract thought and exuberant passion is the tension that existed between Russell's two greatest fears: the fear of loneliness and the fear of madness. At the height of his passion - that is, for about two years - Russell wrote to Ottoline every single day, often two or three times a day, long letters, full of expressions of love, of self-analysis as well as detailed accounts of his day-to-day life. Again, everything was committed to writing, since Ottoline would not leave her husband to live with Russell and therefore their affair had to be conducted principally through correspondence. At night, I didn't kiss Alys often enough, and she began to cry when I put out the light, but I did nothing to comfort her."The dam burst in 1911, when Russell fell in love with Ottoline Morrell and finally left Alys, releasing in the process a torrent of pent-up passion of alarming intensity.

One cannot help but be amazed at Russell's impassiveness in the face of his wife's suffering. For example, in 1902, when he told Alys he no longer loved her, he described how she lay in her bedroom at night while he was in the adjoining study, and "her loud, heart-rending sobs, while I worked at my desk next door". For nine years after that, Russell and Alys lived together, with Russell growing increasingly resentful of her, while doing his best to be outwardly kind and sympathetic (it is no coincidence that his greatest philosophical work was written during these nine years).Again, his diary allowed him to release the feelings that were thus imprisoned, and, again and again, one reads of occasions such as a dinner they both attended, during which, Russell writes, "Most of the people jarred me, misanthropy and misogyny settled on me like a cloud. And, later on, when his first marriage to Alys Pearsall Smith had deteriorated to a hollow shell, he kept another diary in which he expressed all the anger, irritation and even hatred towards his wife that he successfully concealed from her by an outwardly cold demeanour.To read these latter diaries is often a distressing and shocking experience. For, denied the opportunity to express himself orally, Russell took to writing everything down.