I Think of You Constantly with Love: The Letters of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ben Richards (Bloomsbury Academic, 16thApril 2026) offers the most intimate portrait we have of Wittgenstein’s last five years, and the only sustained record of a relationship he experienced as romantic love.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/i-think-of-you-constantly-with-love-9781350026469
Wittgenstein – one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century – formed an intense and transformative bond in 1945 with Ben Richards, a young medical student who attended one of his Cambridge lectures. Their “loving friendship,” as Wittgenstein called it, shaped his final years in ways that have largely remained unseen, until now.
For the first time in English, more than 370 of their letters, postcards, telegrams, and drawings are being published, culminating just a week before Wittgenstein’s death in 1951.
Introduced with a foreword by renowned Wittgenstein biographer Ray Monk, the correspondence shows him stripped of legend: tender, anxious, exacting, sometimes lonely, always intellectually restless. The pages are alive with flashes of humour, sharp judgements, and the raw vulnerability of a man deeply aware of the precariousness of affection.
This collection is the single largest correspondence of Wittgenstein’s that has survived, offering an entirely new window onto Wittgenstein’s inner life, and a profound and moving testament to his emotional and intellectual concerns in his last years.
A revelation for admirers of his philosophy and anyone drawn to the human drama behind genius, this collection illuminates Wittgenstein not as an icon, but as a man reaching, urgently, imperfectly, for connection.
I Think of You Constantly with Love is edited by Gabriel Citron, a lecturer in philosophy at Shalem College, Jerusalem, and Alfred Schmidt, who is the Scientific Assistant to the Director-General of the Austrian National Library.
