Neglected members

SIR: David Horspool’s as usual witty and stimulating review of our (male) parliamentarians who have turned their hands to writing as well as making history didn’t go back in time quite far enough. Well before (T B) Macaulay, a certain Edward Gibbon retrospectively deemed the eight sessions he sat as MP for Liskeard ‘a school of civil prudence’.

He also used them to tell a rather good joke. Why is a fat man like a Cornish voter? Because both very rarely see their member. Professor Paul Cartledge, Cambridge