Why wouldn't they? As Harker's biography shows, MacColl had both political and artistic reasons for deserting in 1940. A discussion of those reasons could have taken up a sizeable section of the book. Then, and again as Harker's biography shows, MacColl spent a good part of the war honing his playwriting skills. How he managed to stay hidden with the authorities after him sounds like quite a story. And on top of there is the story of his arrest and subsequent discharge from army service after the war.

But the war isn't the only strange omission from Journeyman. There is little or nothing about various subjects, including the Critics, the Kinder Scout Trespass, his dissolved marriages, his children and about how his ideas on the folk revival developed. Could it be that those who have criticised Journeyman on the grounds of those and other omissions should have looked on the cutting room floor?