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“... in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me.’ And so it might. As Hunter Davies tells us in this first, thorough biography of the man, two months after he died in January 1991 at the age of 84, his wife and an old friend, both in their 70th year, climbed up to the tarn at seven in the morning by way of Honister old quarry ...”

“... he seems trustworthy: on dry land, I think him no more credible than the posters that annoy him. Hunter Davies is an expense-account tourist, not a traveller. The moral of The Grand Tour is that it is now impossible to make such a tour, except as an irony. In the 18th and 19th centuries, those who made the grand tour carried introductions, lodged with ...”

“... has a Ferrari he doesn’t drive and a yacht he doesn’t sail. He relaxes on a mechanical digger. Hunter Davies calls him the ‘greatest living Cumbrian’. Davies’s book trundles slowly through the birth and marriage of Stobart’s grandfather John and his father’s business beginnings (lime-spreading). We learn ...”

“... politics, indeed too much. Instead, a warm welcome for a new book by that indefatigable tramper Hunter Davies. This one is A Walk along the Tracks,* an exploration of the disused railway lines which have now accumulated to 8,000 miles, with no doubt more to come. Some of these lines have been taken over by enlightened local authorities and turned into ...”

“... passions that have to consume. John Lennon’s death illustrates the dangers. According to Hunter Davies, whose 1968 biography of the Beatles is now updated and revamped (but not enriched by Paul McCartney’s carping account of his friend), it also illustrates Lennon’s ‘enormous contribution to popular music and to the youth of the ...”

“... A pity, since she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ‘invaluable help, talent and patience’. You certainly don’t hear the Cherie described by Michael Levy, ‘every bit the get-ahead barrister’, who on their weekend afternoons ...”

“... was eagerly lobbied for by our detractors. Perhaps the epitaph for the Magazine – long after Hunter Davies, that other Sixties figure, had been hired to tame it – was the final meeting between McCullin and Andrew Neil, Murdoch’s Editor on the Sunday Times, when McCullin was sacked. His images were no longer needed at the beginning of the ...”

“... his staff – at his insistence – as the Master. Interviewing him for the Sunday Times in 1969, Hunter Davies wondered if he had really met Coward or just a facsimile. ‘Is there anything under the cool, charming mask?’ A better prepared journalist would have looked at Coward’s work and found the answer:Miss Hodge: There’s a gentleman to see ...”

“... if their pleasure was faked.’ The connoisseur, the gentleman: elsewhere he becomes the big-game hunter, and the tourist among women. Naturally, though, Simenon didn’t exceed the number of Casanova’s conquests merely out of sport, out of a pure love of sex. As he told Fellini in interview: ‘It wasn’t at all a vice. I have not the slightest sexual ...”

“... account. He quotes at length from Dyer’s own evidence to the commission of inquiry led by Lord Hunter, who had been solicitor general for Scotland in the Asquith government. Again and again, Dyer convicts himself out of his own mouth. As his friend Major General Nigel Woodyatt later told him, ‘he was bound to get the worst of it; not so much for what he ...”

“... I am old enough to remember the Maigret series on television, with Rupert Davies in the starring role. To the accompaniment of a mildly haunting theme tune, a portly figure would appear onscreen, drably but comfortably dressed in raincoat and hat, strolling through the damp, mist-laden streets of Paris, pausing on a bridge to light his pipe and look over his shoulder, the whole scene held in grainy black and white ...”

“... memories of the Wild Hunt, as Falstaff – visibly transfigured by the buck’s horns of Herne the Hunter – is tormented by Mistress Quickly’s Fairy Queen and Pistol’s Hobgoblin. The forest is always liable to appear as the unsettled and unsettling opposite of the urban world, a threatening other whose status as res nullius sets it against the ...”

“... the stories which Campbell circulated as biographical truths: that in his youth he had been a keen hunter and horseman in Natal (he was no good at either); that he was a successful bullfighter (he tried, but was tossed, and the bull stepped on his foot); that he had fought for Franco; that he had fought in the Second World War. Alexander generously tolerates ...”

“... being their pursuer, Richard Nayler, mockingly saluted by James, duke of York, as ‘our regicide-hunter-in-chief’.The New England experiences of Whalley and Goffe are not unknown to historians; Christopher Pagliuco’s The Great Escape of Edward Whalley and William Goffe (2012) and Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and ...”

“... and their pictures over the pages of the science journals. It doesn’t always work out. Fiona Hunter and a colleague, later to expose what the mainstream media dubbed ‘penguin prostitution’ in the Antarctic, once watched a colony of fulmars on Fair Isle for 56 days on the trot, 18 hours a day, only to find the species relatively faithful: a mere 16 ...”