rnest (Ernie) Tate was born in 1934 in Northern Ireland and emigrated to Canada in 1955.He describes himself as "a working class activist without any formal education, politically formed mainly by my experiences in a small Trotskyist group in Canada" (Memoir 2: 164).He came to Britain in 1965 to establish, with much help from his partner, Jess MacKenzie, a British Section of the Fourth International.This is when the International Marxist Group (img) was born.In this review I will limit my comments to Tate's activities in his second volume relating to the brpf, the Vietnam Solidarity
has completed a work of impressive scholarship.The first volume came out in and contains letters, the second letters.The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University hold between thirty and forty thousand of Russell's letters.Griffin does not claim to have looked through all of them, but apart from our editor he has probably read more of them than any other person.This provided him a unique perspective on Russell of which he has made the best.The letters have been intertwined with extensive commentaries and supplied with informative footnotes amounting to approximately pages in the first volume and pages in the second.Together with the prefaces and the introductions, they supply us with an epistolary biography of Russell that covers most aspects of his life.There are some differences between the first and the second volume due to the availability of letters.In the first volume there are many letters to Russell's first wife, Alys, and his lover, Lady Ottoline Morrell.Griffin writes in the preface to the second volume that these touched on almost everything that was important to Russell, which made it unnecessary to look for letters elsewhere.The letters to Ottoline continued their pace until , but he kept on writing to her until she died
