Wittgenstein has had perhaps more influence on post-war philosophical investigation than any other figure. In Ludwig Wittgenstein, Miles Hollingworth continues to pioneer a new kind of biographical writing, here the ingredients are the hypersensitivities of Viennese society in the last part of the nineteenth century, Carnegie-like wealth, Wittgenstein's mother's tightrope between hysteria and sentimentality, his brothers' suicides - all compounded with the academic disciplines of mathematical, linguistic and historical philosophy. In this compelling life, Hollingworth argues that Wittgenstein subsumed all to the nature of what he felt was his own destiny - an inborn genius whose narrative he increasingly fought to control.