When as a philosophy undergraduate, I found myself reading Plato for the first time, I noted a troublesome disconnect between the Plato that I was reading, and possibly fitfully understanding, and the confident nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators that accompanied this reading. My Plato was the practitioner of therapeutic wisdom who aimed to convert your being through the devices of dialogue, storytelling, and myth-making accompanied by unambiguous references to embodied spiritual practices (gymnastics, corybantic dance, and so forth). The Plato of the commentators was a rational philosopher and a committed 'dualist' separating an 'ideal' realm of the good from the messy binding world of 'matter' from which we were presumed to want to escape in a fleeing ascent. You could see where this dualist, binary Plato had come from for he (or better still Socrates) often creates separate images of contrasting worlds to elaborate his points but reading on you
One of my realizations reading this excellent double study of the marriage of Edwin and Willa Muir was that exception reporting (the world is going to hell in a handbasket) is a feature of not only news coverage (after all 99.99999% of the population of the United States were not murdered today) but potentially of biography too, built as it is primarily on letters, memoirs/memories and diaries. We tend not to record the everydayness of our contentments and quiet achievements but how our plans went awry, our anxieties over recognition gnawed, or our painful lumbago! This is important here because Willa Muir especially has been caught between two tendencies. The first was to downplay her own creative role in comparison with her husband. The patriarchial nature of the society in which she lived (and which continues) meant that her achievements, especially those secured together, most notably the translations from German literature - Kafka and Herman Broch especially - tended to be ascri