Alan Bennett on Denton Welch: " Minor writers often convey a more intense flavour of their times than those whose range is broader and concerns more profound. Here the war is met with at every turn, but transmuted into an idyllic pastoral of soldiers bathing, prisoners harvesting and planes crossing the moonlit sky to the sound of distant singing from the pub. As drunken servicemen ride their girlfriends home on the handlebars his diaries sometimes read like the script for a documentary by Humphrey Jennings or notes for a film by Michael Powell."