Richard Titmuss came late to academic life. At 43 when he joined the staff of LSE, this was his first formal membership of any higher education institution. His daughter, on the other hand, entered higher education by going to an élite university at the conventional age of 18 – the élite bit being quite consciously chosen by her to create ripples of parental pride in the Blue Plaque House. The degree was followed by an almost unbroken pursuit of university-based social research (49 years and still counting). Thus, father and daughter both accomplished much of what they are most known for within the institutional structures and strictures of academia. But their experiences differ, not only through the divergence in their interests, but because academia is at heart a patriarchal business – commercially, politically and ideologically.

The original title of Virginia Woolf ’s essay Three guineas, published on the eve of the Second World War in 1938, was On being despised. Conceived as a sequel to her much-quoted A room of one’s own, and building on ten years’ research, it’s an extended critique of the power relations linking gender, aggression, authoritarianism, higher education and the whole superstructure of the patriarchal state. Woolf ’s underlying project in writing Three guineas was to understand the social forces that produce fascism. Her beloved nephew Julian Bell, ‘a young Achilles’, had recently been killed in the Spanish Civil War. He had enlisted as a non-combatant, driving ambulances, a choice that satisfied the Bloomsbury set’s commitment to pacifism, while also permitting that ultimate proof of manhood, participation in war. Because of its subject-matter, readers of Three guineas might have expected as textual illustrations pictures of soldiers, battles and desecrated and damaged bodies splayed on bloody fields. Instead Woolf chose five photographs of men in military, religious, legal, heraldic and academic uniform. The men in these pictures are weighed down with gowns, mortar boards, wigs, medals and swords. Their presence in the text is quite shocking, precisely because it disturbs the reader’s expectation. To some eyes, the men appear so worthy and important; to others they look simply ridiculous – mere boys in fancy dress clothing.

Woolf didn’t find them ridiculous: she found them appalling. To her the figures depicted a destructive symbiosis between the weight of tradition, the state of masculinity and the project of war.