Teenybopper’s first love was David Cassidy | Letters

NHS drugs bill | Facebook | Holly Golightly | David Cassidy | Pronunciation of Italian words

If drug companies raise pricing when drugs are debranded (NHS taken for a ride?, 22 November), why do we not establish a company owned by the NHS or directly by the government to supply the drugs at cost? Surely we cannot afford an ideology that prevents this.
David Barnard
Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire

• Jonathan Freedland suggests “go to settings and select ‘show most recent’” (Opinion, 18 November). If you do this in Facebook, then exit and re-enter, you will find it has reverted to “Top stories”. So the algorithm overrides the user’s own choice. This is indeed sinister.
Tim Large
Reading

• I never realised that Holly Golightly was a call girl (Letters, 21 November). Rather like my father wondering why the cowboys went upstairs with the barroom girls, when all the excitement was happening in the saloon bar downstairs.
Geraldine Blake
Worthing, West Sussex

• You made my day! What a brilliant selection of photographs of David Cassidy on 22 November and a thoughtful obituary (23 November). We may be avid Guardian readers but we were also teenyboppers in the early 70s and Cassidy was my first love!
Caroline Branney
London

• I will allow Alan Greenslade-Hibbert, John Doherty and Steve Vanstone (Letters, 17 and 18 November) their purist approach to the pronunciation of Italian words, provided they support my campaign to reverse the Italianisation of the Spanish word “chorizo”, whose soft Z is not, actually, pronounced like the double Z in “pizza”. I don’t know what they’re going to do about “pistachio”, though…
Isabella Stone
Matlock, Derbyshire

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