I’m not sure if novelist, poet or songwriter best sums up Leonard Cohen (Leonard Cohen dies aged 82, theguardian.com, 11 November). I’d settle for wordsmith. His best work has a timeless quality, as if the words had been hewn out of granite, but leavened with subtle black humour, gentle mockery and self-deprecating irony. Could anyone else have got away with the line “I was born with the gift of a golden voice”?

Mike Pender

Cardiff

• The songs of Leonard Cohen are intense, bitter-sweet and uplifting. He is the sinking man’s Bob Dylan.

John Riseley

Harrogate, North Yorkshire

• Re the FA and poppies (Report, 10 November): the expansion of the public sphere of remembrance reached new venues as one of the traffic matrix signs on the ring road in Wolverhampton reminded drivers of two minutes’ silence at 11am.

Michael Cunningham

Wolverhampton

• It seems there is now a non-negotiable imperative for public personalities to wear poppies, some of them (eg Strictly Come Dancing) donning them like fashion accessories. Does this really remind us of the horrors and tragedy of war or rather reflect the jingoistic intolerance that initially characterised popular attitudes towards participation in the first world war?

Ursula Hutchinson

Newport, Isle of Wight

• On a day when many of us are thinking about the tragic events of 1914-18 you report an assassination plot in the Balkans (Serbia deports Russians suspected of plotting Montenegro coup, theguardian.com, 11 November).

Martin Cooper

Bromley, Kent

• Andrew Steed need not worry (Letters, 11 November). By the vagaries of postcodes and political boundaries in this small corner of the West Midlands, I managed to have a Walsall postal address and live in both Lichfield district and Tamworth constituency all at the same time. My move was only from one side of Sutton Park to the other and I remain a firm Walsallian at heart.

Roy Boffy

Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands

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