Denis Healey, for whose greeting “Hello, young man” I will be forever grateful since I was 60 at the time, was, like me, an inveterate haunter of secondhand bookshops (Letters, 3 August). He told the story of how, when he was chancellor of the exchequer and in the north-east of England on a political visit, he took time off to track down a local secondhand book dealer whose address he had found. The dealer turned out to be working from a council house on a Tyneside estate. Healey rang the doorbell and when the man opened the door, he was astonished to see the very recognisable Healey standing there. “I’ve coom for tha taxes!” Healey boomed.
Karl Sabbagh
Bloxham, Oxfordshire
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