From the point of view of Westerners, in a world coming to terms with the Second World War, it may offer insights. The void that men left when they were sent off to the front made space for women in all fields, and British philosophy was transformed by this shift. Neither the great Enlightenment thinkers of the past, the logical innovators of the early twentieth century, or the new Existentialist philosophy trickling across the Channel, could make sense of this new human reality of limitless depravity and destructive power, the women felt.

They couldn’t – Professor Jerusalem was an Austrian citizen – and she cried all the way through the interview.The occasion of World War II, with its concomitant dispersal of the usual, overwhelmingly male, student body at Oxford and Cambridge into active service, as well as the arrival of intellectual Continental refugees, and the gradually revealed horrors of the Nazi regime, provide a unique opening for the four remarkable and brilliant protagonists of this narrative. Who could tell what new forms of female life were taking shape within the walls of the women’s colleges, and what the effect might be on the world outside? She was a product of Downe House, a school that had begun life in Charles Darwin’s home before moving to The Cloisters, the former home of a female religious community in Berkshire.

The authors spend some time discussing Susan Stebbings-should have been longer- and Freddie Ayer, and his soul-destroying positivism.They do a very good job of explaining some important differences between schools of philosophy in the early and mid twentieth century, but throughout the book the authors use the term “analytic” to refer to the anti-metaphysicians who our heroines are up against. The Inimitable Emil Zátopek, the Greatest Olympic Runner of All Time and Endurance: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Emil Zátopek (the latter which I read and reviewed).