Remembering Harper Lee, 1926-2016

The sad news of Harper Lee’s death at the age of 89 leaves one of modern literature’s great questions unanswered.

We will probably never know whether she gave permission for her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, to be published last year. Perhaps — as the rumours had it — she really was deaf and blind, and mentally incapable of sanctioning the book’s release, as she sat in a nursing home in her birthplace, Monroeville, Alabama.

But I do know that — contrary to popular opinion — she hadn’t shut herself off from the world since To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. Quite the contrary — over the past half-century, she was an exceptional consumer of world affairs, British affairs in particular. She was 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.