Don’t blame the Americans for round tables

SIR – Wynne Weston-davies (Letters, April 21) should not be too hasty in blaming the Americans for round tables. Has he never heard of King Arthur? Malcolm Allen

Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire

SIR – I was delighted by Mr Westondavies’s case against round tables, which surpasses even that of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers character, Archdeacon Grantly.

When his father-in-law suggests that the room intended as a diningroom in the parsonage at St Ewold “would do very well for a round table”, the archdeacon nearly has a fit:

“‘A round table’, said he with some heat, ‘is the most abominable article of furniture that ever was invented.’”

The archdeacon thinks there is “something democratic and parvenu in a round table”, imagining that “dissenters and calico-printers chiefly used them, and perhaps a few literary lions more conspicuous for their wit than their gentility”. Sara Broadbent

Folke, Dorset