Thank you for Tom McCarthy’s superb piece (Does Theresa May really know what citizenship means?, Review, 21 January). I do hope it has been read by the prime minister and fellow politicians of all parties.

Since Mrs May attended a grammar school, as I did in Scotland (where they are called academies), around the same time, she surely had opportunities for some classical education. I was lucky to be taught Latin, French and German at school and could have requested Greek as well as Russian. This while specialising in music, which I continued to study at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow and later in Florence.

I was sorry to read in Tom McCarthy’s piece that classics A-level in England is for the chop under this government. But whether or not Mrs May is familiar with Aeschylus and Euripides, it appeared to me from her Brexit speech that she does know her Machiavelli, whose 16th-century Il Principe was greatly admired by Margaret Thatcher: “It is not the means that matter but the ends,” she assured her audience.

Wilma Paterson

Glasgow

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