Who knows whether Harper Lee, now 89, has given permission for her novel, Go Set a Watchman, to be published next week? Perhaps — as the rumours have it — she really is deaf and blind, and mentally incapable of sanctioning the book’s release, as she sits in a nursing home in her birthplace, Monroeville, Alabama.
But I do know that — contrary to popular opinion — she hasn’t shut herself off from the world since To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. Quite the contrary — in the past half-century, she has been an exceptional consumer of world affairs, British affairs in particular. She’s a long-time Spectator reader, for God’s sake!
How do I know all this? Because she told me — in a letter she sent to me when I was the Telegraph’s New York correspondent.
It was one of those great snapshot moments you remember for ever. On a freezing morning in February 2006, I bicycled down an ice-bound Broadway to the Telegraph’s Manhattan office in SoHo.
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