Jo Johnson, the higher education minister, says “we have too many people coming out of university and winding up in non-graduate jobs” (University fees to be linked to teaching quality, 6 November). This state of affairs is surely due to a shortage of graduate-level jobs and, therefore, poor government economic policy rather than teaching quality. I have no argument with monitoring teaching quality, but to make employment a criterion in assessing teaching quality is to blame universities for government failure and, therefore, to misdirect public attention (again).
Professor Carey Philpott
School of education and childhood, Leeds Beckett University
• Lord West says that Theresa May’s legislation is “critical for the security of our people” (Letters, 7 November). I presume this means he is comfortable with the bulk collection of telephone and email records. Is this the same Alan West whose register of interests says he is a “non-executive director, MCM Solutions (extraction and management of data from digital and non-digital sources)”?
David Hall
Market Harborough, Leicestershire
• Here are the results of my Saturday morning sums, compiled after reading your Remembrance Day anthology (A moment of peace, Review, 7 November). Eight men and three women writers contributed their selections. Fourteen men’s and four women’s pieces were selected. Only one out of the eight men chose a piece written by a woman. Shamefully, the invisibility of women is clearly visible, even in the pages of the Guardian.
Julia Burns
Great Tey, Essex
• Emma Brockes (Notebook, 6 November) quotes what she assumes was a joyless writing tutor, asking his students “What hurt you into poetry?”. The phrase derives from WH Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats, where Auden says of Yeats that “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”. Yeats may indeed have penned many an ominous stanza, but “the good are always the merry”, and the folk in heaven may well have greeted him as the “fiddler of Dooney” and “danced like a wave of the sea”.
Peter McKenna
Liverpool
• Forget the worst two words (Letters, 9 November). Surely the scariest three letters must be AGM.
Charles Harris
London
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