From Mr Paul C. Grisanti.

Sir, It was difficult to leave Pope John Paul II out of a list of heroes of 1989, since without him Solidarity and the anti-communist resistance in Poland would have been a shadow of its actual self. Sadly, your editorial “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (November 9), on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, managed to do that. As Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash said at the pope’s death in 2005, this was the greatest man of our time.