My mother was an admirer of Roy Hattersley (Obituary, 14 June), and would regularly cut out his Endpiece column from the Guardian and post it to me when I was a student in the early 1990s. These articles were always witty and thought-provoking.
I’ve just found one of these clippings (from 1991) in my paperback copy of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, where he describes buying the same edition in a Bath bookshop, having been seduced by the cover, and then by the book itself. On this advice, I bought and read the book myself.
