By a chair's breadth

Colin Mills (THES, Letters, May 16) spotted the effect of a gremlin's having changed an important word in my review of the Halsey autobiography the previous week (THES, May 9).

Not only did the London School of Economics have the first UK chair of sociology - and indeed Liverpool was another pioneer - but many other universities established chairs in the subject in the 1960s, so that Oxford's chair in 1978 was distinctly belated.

John Honey, Cambridge