Britain
Bertrand Russell
1872–1970 Philosopher and anti-war campaigner; imprisoned 1918
Born the grandson of a former prime minister, Earl Russell, and orphaned in early childhood, Bertrand Russell became a Cambridge mathematician and philosopher who wrote Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead. When the First World War began he became active in the anti-war movement. In 1916 he was fined £100 for an anti-war pamphlet and dismissed from his lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge. A second conviction, for suggesting that American troops might be used to intimidate strikers in Britain, sent him to Brixton Prison in 1918, where he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 and died on 2 February 1970.