A Box of Wittgensteins

Margaret Stonborough, the great-niece of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, talks to artist and historian Michael Huey as she delves into six boxes of newly-inherited family archives. As she digs deeper into the talented but tortured lives of the Wittgensteins she finds her cramped London house becoming ever more crowded with her larger-than-life forbears. At the end of the First World War, letters and artefacts show that the surviving Wittgensteins were attempting to pick up their lives but they are rarely far from tragedy. Within a few years, the family history of suicide loomed over them once again. The readers are Sarah Finch, Nicholas Rowe and Dan Starkey.