The book focuses mainly on the 1930s to the 1950s, following the four from their undergraduate years to the start of their professional careers. Stories that rival in passion and intrigue anything that Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels have to offer and contain much to interest specialists as well as general readers. Nonetheless, this book deserves 4* for highlighting how the significant female philosophers surveyed revitalised ethics as a serious subject for philosophical study.

An Oxford in which male tutors saw female students as fair game – wife or mistress fodder - thinking nothing of propositioning a woman student mid tutorial. An approach possibly forgivable in a book of the 1920s but not one of today, and trust me I am no libertarian or moralist. In their unfashionable view that it is possible, as Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman put it, to ‘use [the] language of morals and speak of objective moral truth’, and their conviction that human beings are ‘social, creative, curious, spiritual’ creatures rather than mere ‘efficient calculating machines’, the four heroines of this book were untimely. As the title says, we are metaphysical animals, so we cannot be fully understood without considering our spiritual, irrational, social and emotional qualities.In their unfashionable view that it is possible, as Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman put it, to 'use [the] language of morals and speak of objective moral truth', and their conviction that human beings are 'social, creative, curious, spiritual' creatures rather than mere 'efficient calculating machines', the four heroines of this book were untimely. This is a worthwhile and serious work about the influence of these four as they attempt to repair and rescue philosophy from the often dismissive and rarified place into which the discipline had devolved by the time the war broke out.

From the point of view of Westerners, in a world coming to terms with the Second World War, it may offer insights. Though Mary was by far the taller, when people saw her and Iris together, crossing the Somerville College lawn, it was Iris they remembered – her ‘corn-hair’ and confidence caught the eye. Elizabeth Anscombe goes to the zoo with Wittgenstein and talks about a drawing of hares and a turned duckface.Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman brilliantly weave together richly detailed accounts of the lives and relationships of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. Then World War 2 happened, and Ayer and the other male proponents of logical positivism went off to war, leaving an Oxford filled with women as well as older men and refugees who could not serve (such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose pupil, translator, and editor Anscombe became). In their first year of Greats, Iris and Mary would have the pick of fourteen lecture courses dedicated to works over 2,000 years old. It was distracting at first (do I need to know all the plants that were in the garden at Elizabeth’s school?