Some New Year’s Resolutions for the inauspicious year of 1984, published in The Times on 31 December 1983:

‘My resolve for 1984 is to suffer wtih saintly equanimity the great irritations of our time: the cult of the ugly, the jargon of the fashionable and the assaults of bureaucracy.’ — William Trevor, writer

‘I hope that Roland Rat’s contribution to English literature and drama is recognised for what it really is.’ — Greg Dyke, editor-in-chief of TV-am

‘I hope that 1984 will not prove the sombre year it promises to be – that the people of inhumanity, aggression and barbarism, of confrontation and conflict, of totalitarian desires and a will to instability, will not dominate, and some sense of an end-of-the-century promise will begin to emerge … May we have imagination instead of politics, aspiration instead of history. A pretty vain hope, I think.’ – Malcolm Bradbury, novelist

‘My first good resolution is to accept the process of forgetting things as inevitable and even healthy. After all, in the end we forget everything.’ — William Golding, novelist

‘If the whole world could just be nice to each other for a year I’d be happy.’ — Floella Benjamin, presenter of Playschool

‘Resolutions: zero. Hopes: zero.’ — Samuel Beckett, playwright