Brixton prison received Russell twice, in 1918 and 1961, and the two terms bracket his public life. The first came for an article in a pacifist weekly during the last winter of the Great War, judged likely to prejudice relations with an ally; six months in the first division, where a prisoner of means furnished his own cell, and where Russell wrote his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and read enormously, remarking that he found prison in many ways quite agreeable. He had already lost his Trinity College lectureship over his agitation against conscription. The second term, seven days in 1961 after a sentence commuted on grounds of age, followed a Committee of 100 demonstration against nuclear weapons; the magistrate offered to excuse him on a promise of good behaviour, and the mathematician, then eighty nine, declined to give it.
Between the two imprisonments lay the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, awarded to a man whom a New York court had declared morally unfit to teach a decade earlier, and the essays, Why I Am Not a Christian above all, in which he made unbelief a matter of plain prose rather than defiance. His celestial teapot, offered in a 1952 essay that its commissioning magazine never printed, gave the argument about burden of proof its permanent image. The consistency across four decades was the point: the same man, the same courtesies, the same refusal, whether the objectionable war was in progress or merely in preparation.