When in 1950 Bertrand Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in recognition of the exemplary clarity of his philosophical prose, the honour must have seemed to him tinged with some irony. Although he took legitimate pride in the lucid expression of his professional thought, he was disappointed by his failure to distinguish himself in literature as a creative author. For this reason, there was probably no other field in which he felt a greater disparity between his aspiration and his achievement. In an ill-conceived attempt to rectify the situation, he set about during his eighties to write a series of short stories. Twice before (in 1902–3 and in 1911–13), he had turned to imaginative writing, but the results on those occasions had not pleased him. Despite all his striving to do more, Russell's contribution to literature was limited to two functions: as an essayist, and as a character for other authors to portray. With the essay, a genre in which argument takes precedence over imagination, his genius as an analytical thinker found an appropriate form. Although he never composed the imaginative masterpieces he so ambitiously intended, he did serve unwittingly as a model for a number of portraits by other writers. Of these the most famous are Mr Apollinax, the eponymous character of T.S. Eliot's poem, Sir Joshua Malleson in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, and Scogan in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. These representations could, to say the least, have offered little to assuage his general dissatisfaction about his role in literature.