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“... When​ Shelagh Delaney, all of 19, started writing A Taste of Honey, it had only two characters: Jo, the 15-year-old Salford school-leaver whose choices and chances structure the story, and her forty-year-old often skint but always cadging mother, Helen. Other characters were added later. Peter, the louche businessman with a ‘wallet full of reasons’ to lure Helen offstage and into a brief marriage for the play’s middle sections ...”

“... are artists: John Gielgud as Josephine Tey’s Richard II is chiselled and melting, dripping gold. Shelagh Delaney, more used to being inspected than seen, is focused, elegant, apparently sizing up the photographer. Iris Murdoch, all quiet angles, is rather cornily pictured reading. She is said to have been mistaken for a cleaning lady when she turned up ...”

“... of Northern oppressiveness and delighted in ambitions of escaping it: he was every character in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, including the city, including the baby. If you take his word for it (and one tends to), his mission had already begun when a musician called Johnny Marr came knocking on his door asking him if he wanted to form a ...”

“... Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental education. Together with plays by John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney, these books inspired a New Wave British cinema which during the early 1960s seemed as though it might rival its celebrated Continental counterparts in originality and scope. Shot largely on location, New Wave films gave an unapologetic voice ...”

“... early 1960s novel of beatnik shenanigans in the heightened kitchen-sink mode of Shena Mackay and Shelagh Delaney, only nastier. She based her characters on people she knew from her local pub, so closely that her publisher required a letter of comfort from the man who supplied the model for the novel’s charismatic villain (whom the novel describes, at ...”