Female and formidable

SIR – You report (March 15) a move within Oxford’s Philosophy Faculty to highlight the presence on the reading list of women philosophers. There will be no quota, we are led to understand, but 40 per cent seems about right to the equalities and diversity lobby, in sending a message to 17-year-old female applicants that “philosophy is for you”.

Mention is made of Elizabeth Anscombe, Wittgenstein’s apostle, who throughout a long career wrote as GEM Anscombe. “Understandably”, if only initials appear, “students won’t know she was female”. I trust that snowflakes are alerted to her in the round (which, as a mother of seven, she often was): monocle-sporting, cigar-puffing, a denouncer of homosexuality and the deliverer of that most bloodcurdling threat to a naughty child: “If you do that again, I’ll put you on the train to Bicester”. (He did it again, and she, wonderfully, did as she had promised.)

On a day when so many are confessing that they didn’t get far with Hawking’s Brief History of Time, I wish well those whom Oxford seeks to attract as they settle down to “Miss Anscombe”: not a soft option. Dr Andrew Jones

Halesworth, Suffolk