After five years of beavering away in isolation and complete obscurity, it is tremendously exciting to pick up a nationally distributed newspaper or magazine and read a review of one's own book. This has been my happy situation for the last two weeks, during which time most quality newspapers have carried a review of my biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The impact on me has been that of saturation coverage, but that's because I've bought every single paper or journal that has carried a review. The cumulative effect has been to provide me, momentarily, with the delightful illusion that I am famous, an illusion that is, however, cruelly shattered whenever I ask friends if they have seen the reviews. No, they reply, they don't read the literary sections, they just glance at the news headlines and the sports pages.

LRB 22 November 1990 | PDF Download