One of the greatest prodigies of his era John Stuart Mill was studying arithmetic and Greek by the age of three as part of an astonishingly intense education at his father's hand. Intellectually brilliant fearless and profound he became a leading Victorian liberal thinker whose works - including On Liberty Utilitarianism The Subjection of Women and this autobiography - are among the crowning achievements of the age. Here he describes the pressures placed on him by his childhood the mental breakdown he suffered as a young man his struggle to understand a world of feelings and emotions far removed from his father's strict didacticism and the later development of his own radical beliefs. A moving account of an extraordinary life this great autobiography reveals a man of deep integrity constantly searching for truth.