His socialist views, profoundly at odds with his family background, find expression in *Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism, published in 1918 by Allen & Unwin (as were the following four books). The Russian Revolution had just broken out, and after visiting the land of Lenin and Trotsky, he voiced his criticisms of the new regime in 1920 in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. Later, in 1929, he outlined his liberal views on sexual morality in Marriage and Morals, which earned him the disapproval of the "self-righteous." In The Conquest of Happiness* (1930) and In Praise of Idleness (1932), he advocates a different way of life, out of step with the society of the time. Russell writes with humor, and his argument seems lighthearted throughout. Yet he defends his sometimes iconoclastic positions with biting irony and, once again, by using paradox.
In the immediate postwar period, his writings became more encyclopedic in scope, notably with *A History of Western Philosophy (Simon & Schuster, 1946) and Human Knowledge* (Allen & Unwin, 1948).
