Letters: John Saville and Steve Race

Doreen Massey and Hilary Wainwright write: In the late 1980s, we joined John Saville (obituary, 16 June) on the Lipman (now the Lipman Miliband) trust for socialist education. John and his friend Ralph Miliband would bicker - fiercely but with great comradeship - over grants for tiny sums, as if a major political principle was at stake. These encounters, punctuated with tales from soldiers' politics in the second world war, and from the dismal politics of the 1950s, were a socialist education for us. On our shared birthday, we arrived to find John and Ralph standing to mock attention, John holding two bouquets and Ralph a birthday cake. They provided a wonderful mix of intellectual rigour, political passion and personal warmth.

Ronald Atkins writes: Steve Race (obituary, 24 June) made a number of contributions to jazz. He led a quintet that included John Dankworth on one of the earliest recorded examples of British bebop, and was among the first British writers to welcome the then-new style, openly championing Dave Brubeck.

As a jazz broadcaster, he is best remembered as a compere of BBC2's pioneering Jazz 625. On the radio, he presented The Jazz Scene. Plugging the output of a tiny record company in the late 1950s, I spent Saturday afternoons in a studio at Broadcasting House watching Steve run through his selection of new discs and hoping to hear one of ours. If he regarded my presence as a bit of a joke, he never let on.