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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”