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...