6 NOVEMBER 2004, Page 38

Not my style

From Francis King Sir: In his review of Neville and June Braybrookes' Olivia Manning (Books, 30 October), Philip Hensher takes me to task, as editor, for not having 'done something to improve the Braybrookes' plodding prose'. That was not my remit. If a besieging mob of Mr Hensher's frenzied fans were accidentally to suffocate him and I was then asked (highly improbable) to prepare for publication his last bequest to posterity, I should not dream of substituting my drearily subfuse style for his adventurously polychromatic one. Similarly, it was never my purpose to try to transform the Braybrookes' far from inadequate authorial voices into my own.

Francis King

London WS