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
