I SAW the letter from A R Davies (7/9/2017).

Obviously I do not agree with Denning’s views as reported in The Spectator.

Nor do I agree with capital punishment.

Would it perhaps be fair to point out that Lord Denning would have been about 90 at the time?

A good proportion of folk might have developed dementia by then or, failing that, some mental decline.

I was attempting to look at the judge’s life as a whole - he lived to 100.

I could have mentioned the Denning report which was a best seller.

Denning obviously though that the Birmingham six were guilty, so that “hanging innocent people” would not logically arise.

His mistake was to believe that the police and prison authorities had not systematically lied.

His comments during a relevant appeal hearing would be instructive.

I respect A N Wilson as a journalist and especially as a writer of biographies and novels.

I have just read his 500 plus page biography of Tolstoy and read the one on Hilaire Belloc.

He, Wilson, can be controversial.

My landlord (Harrow and Sandhurst - son of Eton) when I spent some time in an Oxfordshire village in 1990 said, in terms, that Wilson could be a bit of a “trouble maker” at times relating to Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Michael O’Neill

Railway Terrace

Penarth