The lyricist who wrote the English libretto for Les Miserables felt he was not given enough credit for transforming the original French musical into the longer version known and loved by millions today, letters reveal. The archive of the late showbusiness journalist Herbert Kretzmer, who died in 2020 aged 95, has been donated to Cambridge University Library. Kretzmer continued that it “must… be understood that the English version of Les Miserables is very much original material, different in terms of culture and reference from the original libretto”. Dr Liz Savage, special collections assistant at Cambridge University Library, helped to catalogue the Les Miserables sections of the archive. The archive shows Kretzmer trying out various other words including “valiant” and “fearless”, before deciding on “angry”.