Spectator letters: PPE, Biblical bishops and Pamela Hansford Johnson

Degrees of ability

Sir: Nick Cohen has written an amusing piece on PPE (‘Crash course’, 27 September), marred by lazy journalism. I never said that Cameron was ‘my ablest pupil’, an impossible judgment to make. What I said was that he was ‘one of my ablest pupils’. He was also, incidentally, one of the nicest. And I cannot help feeling that a degree which produced two Nobel prize winners in economics — Hicks and Meade — and three of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century — Isaiah Berlin, Strawson and Dummett — must have a bit more to be said for it than Nick Cohen and other journalists suggest.
Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government, King’s College, London

How Balfour chillaxed

Sir: Adrian Wooldridge (‘The Cameron way’, 27 September) refers to one of Arthur Balfour’s hobbies — golf — but omits two others that were no less important to him: tennis (he played on Wimbledon’s Centre Court in his sixties) and being spanked by his mistress, Lady Elcho. He was the greatest prime-ministerial exponent of ‘chillaxing’ in British history.
Alistair Lexden

House of Lords, London SW1

Spectator memories

Sir: I was much amused by Mark Amory’s account of his early days at The Spectator (Diary, 20 September). It brought to mind my time working for one of his predecessors, Maurice Cowling, in the ‘bad patch’ you referred to. I was at The Spectator (then at 99 Gower Street) for a year between school and university, when George Gale was editor, and Maurice deigned to visit Bloomsbury from his base at Peterhouse, Cambridge, once or twice a week to supervise the book reviews. The rest of the week I would liaise with him by telephone, presumably interrupting his tutorials as I briefed him on the books that had arrived for review.