30 APRIL 1983, Page 18

Who he?

Sir: P.J. Kavanagh asks 'Who was H.J. Massingham?' (Postscript, 23 April). He was a prolific author of the first half of this century, and son of H.W. Massingham, the great Radical Liberal journalist. His good prose and his books, on the countryside, the Welsh Marches, the virtues of self- sufficiency and of small farms and smallholdings, were compulsive reading to many. His views on conservation were a generation and more ahead of the period.

It is time that reprints of some of his books were produced and perhaps A Treasury of Seventeenth-Century English Verse is a start.

David Summers Marsh Cottage, Old Romney, Romney Marsh, Kent