Shirley Robin Letwin

Shirley Robin Letwin (17 February 1924 – 19 June 1993) was an American academic who lived in London.^[1][2]

Biography

Early life

Shirley Robin Letwin was born in Chicago, Illinois.^[1][2] Her family were Jewish immigrants from Kiev.^[3][1][2] She graduated from the University of Chicago, where she was taught by Friedrich Hayek, and did graduate studies at the London School of Economics.^[1][2] She decided to move to England permanently in 1965.

Career

She taught at LSE and at Peterhouse, a college of the University of Cambridge, in the 1970s,^[2] a time when the college was a haunt of radical conservative thinkers focused loosely around Maurice Cowling. She wrote many books about conservatism, and one about Anthony Trollope.^[4]

She met Margaret Thatcher through her friend Keith Joseph, and started working for her.^[1] She also worked for the Centre for Policy Studies.^[1] She was also close to Michael Oakeshott and later became his literary executor.^[1][2] In 1987, she gave a lecture at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia.^[2]

Personal life

She was married to William Letwin.^[1] They had one son, Oliver Letwin.^[1][2][5][6] They lived in London, in a house overlooking Regent's Park.^[1] She was an avid tennis player, and once played with Milton Friedman despite the fact that it was snowing.^[1]

Bibliography

• The Gentleman in Trollope: individuality and moral conduct (1982)
• On the History of the Idea of Law
• The Pursuit of Certainty: David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Beatrice Webb
• The Anatomy of Thatcherism (1992)