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“... or anyone, would walk away from the money. It was probably tactful of Boorman not to mention that Walker (Parker’s new name) was possibly dead, or else dreaming the whole story, like Charles Foster Kane.Isn’t this heady, inside movies stuff just what you hoped for? Well, I should tell you now that much of what I’ve talked about so far comes from ...”

“... with wartime controls was an aberration. (Wartime America was much less obedient.) Cartoon by David Langdon for ‘Punch’, November 1949. Mark Roodhouse’s answer to the crude question of just how much black market activity there was in Britain, both during the war and in the period of postwar austerity, is that, though widespread, it was far less so ...”

“... produced such enormous results that, by 1983, the then minister for agriculture, Peter Walker, was able to claim that the UK was now 75 per cent self-sufficient in temperate foodstuffs and, more remarkable still, according to the boast of the Conservative Campaign Guide that year, 100 per cent self-sufficient in wheat.Free trade zealots retorted ...”

“... else, he wanted lots of quick and easy money. Where to start? The answer was obvious. Slater Walker. In 1974 everyone who was anyone was talking about this get-rich-quick financial empire founded by a city slicker and a Tory MP. The first lie I ever extracted from Jonathan Aitken was in reply to an inquiry about some insider dealing he’d been up to at ...”

“... many-sidedness of this writer that the other evidence of the revival of interest in him, Professor Walker’s selection of the writings concerned with Scotland, is the work of a Scots-born professor of Spanish in Canada. There is no section on the political and polemical writings and speeches on Scotland. Two stories, the much-anthologised ‘Beattock for ...”

“... set the members at odds with the leadership of the Alliance and represented a direct rebuke of David Owen’s much more hawkish SDP. Labour was different. ‘The Labour Party will never die’ was one of Thatcher’s mantras. What Labour did mattered because it was the only alternative party of government. And in this case the party members were in tune ...”

“... that Dickens was then busy launching; one thanked a Sheffield firm (innocently mentioned in David Copperfield) for the gift of a set of knives; another attempted to patch up his lapsed friendship with George Cruikshank, who had probably been offended by Dickens’s attacks on his temperance pamphlets; another was a long, newsy report to a Swiss friend ...”

“... the classic paradigm of the family as a microcosm of society. It is the Swinging Sixties. Harriet Walker and David Lovatt meet at an office party and discover that they are both ‘eccentrics’, at odds with the prevailing social climate: they want to fall in love, marry and settle down to have at least six (or eight, or ...”

“... other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his book, though distancing him by ...”

“... however, exists between newspapers and the national Establishment. On this point Martin Walker quotes approvingly the views of Wilbur Schramm: ‘Prestige papers are shaped, to an important degree, by what the leadership in the country wants to know and wants known. The leadership in the country is also shaped, to an important degree, by what the ...”

“... subsidy of any state enterprise. The Government, and especially the Energy Secretary, Peter Walker – who had been informed by Thatcher, at the time of his appointment, that his job was to defeat the NUM – had laid the ground as carefully as possible, pushing through legislation which made picketing illegal, preparing the police and changing the ...”

“... as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom as ‘Brooklynese speech’. But at least it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a ‘companion’, not a history. I wish I could say the same for the season’s lot of general surveys, which look so authoritative to the ...”

“... into Scouse, seedbed of poetry and stronghold of music hall as well as of the high culture of the Walker Gallery and the orchestras. Arthur Ballard, one of Lennon’s teachers at the art school, has rightly said that it took twenty years’ work to create the culture which produced John Lennon. A deeper study of this period would show Lennon systematically ...”

“... David Mitchell​ is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key coming-of-age story, set in Worcestershire in 1982, full of references to Findus Crispy Pancakes, the Falklands War and playground slang ...”

“... now I have taken the view that my ‘Desert Island’ book, if I were asked, would have to be David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. First published in 1970, it has just re-appeared as A Biographical Dictionary of Film in a third edition that is revised and considerably enlarged. Despite its titles it is indeed a work of ...”