Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I got this book because I haven't read Plato in a while and I wanted a convenient volume that I could keep by the bedside. It would be good for me, I decided, to read a dialogue each night before bed. Who knows, maybe I would even dream of Socrates. When I am not reading it, the 1800-page volume can also serve as a sturdy little bedside table, a handsome place to put your tea and biscuits. (If you don't mind setting your cup of tea on the cornerstone of western civilisation.) It has been a delight to rediscover the dialogues in these elegant contemporary translations, and a surprise to discover so many additional works that I had never seen before. The publisher's workmanship is beautiful too, with quality paper, good cloth binding, and attractive typesetting with generous margins. I like to have room on the page to scribble my own impertinent replies to Socrates, and to ask him questions that he always affably refuses to answer. Yesterday I had left the book open in the middle of Alcibiades. When I came back into the room one of my children was reading it. "What's this?" she said. "A novel, or a collection of stories?" "It's philosophy," I said. "Philosophy!" She was stunned. "I never knew philosophy was so funny." It is a testament to the quality of these translations that a child could mistake Plato for a novelist; that she could read him without having the faintest idea that it was Serious Business; and that her first response to Plato's Socrates was laughter.