What, no Sappho? | Poetry in newspapers | Rain risk for mobility scooters | The Healeys on holiday | Cheap beer in Yorkshire

Three-quarters of the 20 “most influential women in history” (Report, 9 August) are British; all but three lived post-1800; and all but three are (probably) “white”. So the 19th-century philanthrophist Angela Burdett-Coutts gets in, but Sappho, Cleopatra, Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc, Catherine de Medici, Catherine the Great, the Dowager Empress Cixi, Rosa Luxemburg, Eva Perón and Indira Gandhi are left out. Maybe we shouldn’t take such lists too seriously.

Alan Knight

Emeritus professor of history, Oxford University

• “Newspapers of the day would generally have a daily poetry column” (Mill workers’ poems about 1860s cotton famine rediscovered, 9 August). And you can barely review a single volume of poetry a month.

Fr Julian Dunn

Great Haseley, Oxfordshire

• On Thursday mornings I nearly always go out on my mobility scooter, which must not be allowed to get wet, so the “risk” of rain is very real, even though I do lug watering cans too (Letters, 8 August). It can rain on Thursday afternoon.

Patricia Martin

Leatherhead, Surrey

• Everyone seems to have met the Healeys on holiday (Letters, passim). We bumped into them in Annecy, France, on a hot day in August 1981. They both looked very overheated, so though tempted to congratulate him on retaining the deputy Labour leadership, we let them pass by unmolested.

Margaret Hopkins

Epping, Essex

• £2.35 a pint in Carlisle (Letters, 9 August)? Call that cheap? If you study in Yorkshire, you can consume ale at £2 (Sam Smith alehouses).

Barry Norman (Carlisle exile)

Leeds

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