A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

Certain kinds of life produce a certain kind of thinking and a certain kind of thinking produces a certain kind of life. As Midgley says in Science and Poetry, life and thought are not really separate at all. So, from the earliest anecdotes of her comfortable childhood, enlivened by roaming the countryside with her brother and the political and theological convictions of her rector father, The Owl of Minerva is as much structured by the development of a philosophical attitude as it is with autobiographical description. School at Downe House follows, with cheerful accounts of learning this and that, theatricals, good and bad teaching and then, as a result of happening to pick-up Plato's Phaedo on a wet afternoon in the Library, winning a place to read Greats at Oxford. 

The Oxford years are spiked through with stories of a remarkable generation of female students; Midgley's friends and contemporaries included Iris Murdoch, Mary Warnock, Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. After war work in London, an entertaining interlude as secretary to Sir Gilbert Murray, and graduate work back at Oxford where she encountered Wittgenstein storming the barricades of the analytical philosophers, she began teaching at Reading, then moved to Newcastle where she taught, with time off to bring up her three children, until she retired. Young academics on the RAE treadmill will read with some envy that despite this active, distinguished career, Midgley did not publish her first book, Beast and Man, until she was 60, something she says she was profoundly grateful for because it gave her time to work out what it was she thought.

Much of the shorter last section of the book, dealing with her life post-retirement is actually taken up with the sad story of the closing of Newcastle's philosophy department and the blow this was to her husband Geoffrey Midgley and her colleagues. The story becomes less about her own late-flowering professional triumph, and more about a battle with few victors. Despite having earned the right to do so, she never quite says that things ain't what they used to be, but subtly notes the loss of things and experiences valued by the holistic philosophy she practises: the green fields of her childhood, long since swallowed up by London's sprawl, the stars she learned to identify at school blocked out by light pollution and the collective, teaching-based academic life that she and Geoffrey encouraged, overtaken by the pressures of the current publications-focused climate. 

Midgley writes with the characteristic clarity and grace of her philosophical works, as well as the familiar waspish and witty tone of her more combative encounters. There are some very funny lines: I found that one husband and three children were quite as much as I could manage. I never felt inclined to branch out on larger numbers of either, as so many people do. This companionable book enacts its own subtext by generously guiding its readers through concepts which they may not be familiar with, and helping them to understand how these ideas have informed and structured a life so richly lived.