In the autumn term of 1911, the relatively equable and straightforward Bertrand Russell (who was thirty-nine at the time) began a friendship with a strange and wild-eyed foreigner, a twenty-two-year-old Manchester University engineering student, who began to show up repeatedly at Russell’s door in Staircase I of Nevile’s Court, Trinity College Cambridge. ‘[C. K. Ogden and I] were in the middle of … a lot of complicated problems [in mathematical logic] when an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German …’ (Russell, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 18 October 1911, in McGuinness 1988, 89).