controversial, with reviewers criticizing it for drawing unwarranted connections between disparate events. The main criticisms were that: Cornish's evidence is contentious. Hitler and Wittgenstein did attend the same school at the same time, but there is little evidence that they knew each other. There is no evidence that there was a personal antagonism between them, or that Hitler's dislike of Wittgenstein shaped the course of Nazi anti-Semitism. Despite the wealth of material which has emerged from the archives of the KGB since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no evidence that Wittgenstein was amongst the higher-level Soviet spies in the UK, or that he was a Soviet agent, or that he had pro-Soviet sympathies at all. Cornish misrepresents Wittgenstein's thought and his philosophical context, or simply does not understand him. One of the main issues of contention is the claim that Wittgenstein triggered or substantially contributed to Hitler's antisemitism while they were at school together. It is a view that has some support. British professor Laurence Goldstein, in his Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and His Relevance to Modern Thought (1999), called Cornish's book important, writing: "For one thing, at the K.u.k. Realschule in Linz, Wittgenstein met Hitler and may have inspired in him a hatred of Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust. This, naturally enough, weighed heavily on Wittgenstein's conscience in his later years ... It is overwhelmingly probable that Hitler and Wittgenstein did meet, and with dire consequences for the history of the world." Reviewing Goldstein's own book, Mary McGinn called it a sloppy and irresponsible argument: "[O]ne is amazed at the sheer looseness of thought that allows him to assert that 'at certain points in Mein Kampf where Hitler seems to be raging against Jews in general it is the individual young Ludwig Wittgenstein whom he has in mind', and to suggest that Wittgenstein 'may have inspired … (the) hatred of Jews which led, ultimately, to the Holocaust'. It is exactly this sort of sloppy, irresponsible, 'plausible' style of thought that Wittgenstein's philosophy, by its careful attention to the particular and to not saying more or less than is warranted, is directed against." Selected reviews Ray Monk, one of Wittgenstein's biographers, concentrates on the inconsistencies in Cornish's theory that Wittgenstein was the head of the Cambridge spy ring, asking why Cornish has apparently not bothered to verify any of his theories by checking