Alan Johnson > Quotes

“The strike had been a major national event. It was a tumultuous period in my life and in the history of the union. It would be a long time before the membership had the stomach for another national strike. If anyone had told me in 1971 that when that time came I would have the responsibility for settling it, I’d have thought they’d taken leave of their senses.”
― Alan Johnson, Please, Mister Postman

“As for Scargill’s insistence that he’d been right about the Coal Board’s plans to close pits: as somebody once said, the job of the trade-union leader isn’t to predict rain, it’s to build the bloody ark.”
― Alan Johnson, Please, Mister Postman

“As well as myself, there was Paul Swinson, whose father wrote comic songs for the Parlophone label, recorded by the likes of Peter Sellers, and a tall lad whose Mod stylishness was rather spoiled by Hank Marvin-type horn-rimmed spectacles. His name was Stephen Hackett, or Steve Hackett, as he was better known later, when he became famous as a guitarist with Genesis and GTR.”
― Alan Johnson, This Boy

“Cheating is an health issue.”
― Alan Johnson