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.

Rereading the yellowing paper of this review, I am struck by his warmth and humour, and his great interest in people. The end of the piece could stand for Hattersley’s own writing: “Bennett wrote about real emotions, and that is all that is worth writing about. It does not matter when the story was written, only when it was read.”
Matthew Newman
Leeds

With regard to the obituary of Lord Hattersley, one matter worth recording, from his spell as deputy to the foreign secretary James Callaghan, is his exchange of notes with the chargé d’affaires at the US embassy on 25 February 1976. In it, he conveyed the UK government’s “approval in principle … to the development of the present limited naval communications facility on Diego Garcia into a support facility of the United States Navy”.

Such a decision must have been made at a higher level than Hattersley’s, but it was his signature that inaugurated a further development in the history of the Chagos archipelago, which remains a contentious element of Britain’s post-imperial history, and which complicates the UK-US relationship.
George Baugh
Much Wenlock, Shropshire