I really need to stop reading books like this. Frank Ramsey died at age 27 in 1930. By that time he had been appointed to a Fellowship at Trinity College Cambridde, made fundamental contributions (some of which decades ahead of their time) in philosophy, mathematics, and economics. He had established himself as a peer of the intellectual giants of the 21st century (JM Keynes, Wittgenstein, GE Moore, Bertrand Russell, Veriginia Woolf…), He was married with two kids, had a mistress (known to his wife Lettice as they were in a polyamorous relationship) and a busy social life. I am 36 and suddenly feel like I've done nothing with my life.

Feelings of extistential dread aside, this was a really interesting read. The author, Cheryl Misak, is herself a phiolosopher who wrote this book during a fellowship so it serves as a sort of intellectual history of Ramsey and the early 20th century millieu trying to work through the foundations of mathematics as much as a traditional who/what/when/where biography of Ramsey's life. Aside from Misak's own attention to the ideas, she included a number of more technical interludes by other scholars covering a diversity of topics Ramsey touched on dduring his life. All in all, if you wanted to read a general intellectual history of the Cambridge analytic phiolosphy scene in the 1920s you could honestly do a lot worse than this book.