The Daily Mail has published a series of letters from Miles Kington to his friend and literary agent Gill Coleridge, which were sent just days before the Independent columnist died from cancer.

“I tend to shy away from bad news,” he writes. “But I know that a writer wouldn’t devote his last months to writing about cancer if there wasn’t some money in it.

“I think phrases like ‘cashing in on cancer’ give quite the wrong impression. What I mean is ‘making cancer work for its living’.”