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“... Elizabeth Jane Howard had been a novelist for forty years before she published The Light Years, the first volume of the Cazalet chronicles, in 1990. The fifth and final volume, All Change, was published in 2013, and she died in January this year, aged ninety. Her stepson Martin Amis advised her to embark on the Cazalet books, when she was hesitating between possibilities ...”

“... Jaffrey arrived in London from Delhi in 1955 to study at Rada, and taught herself to cook using her mother’s recipes because she disliked English food (except fish and chips). In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ...”

“... 1961 in London’s Fortune Theatre where I was appearing with my colleagues and co-writers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe.It was a smash hit, with every night the audience studded with celebrities, and accordingly at one performance there was the queen. My particular tour de force in the second half was an Anglican ...”

“... reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist crap ...”

“... on her first voyage. In 1940, stealthily, in time for trooping duties, there arrived the Queen Elizabeth (the name which, many thought, should have gone to the Queen Mary). If Winston Churchill was right, the two Queens, by virtue of their speed and ability to carry 15,000 men each, shortened the war by about a year. That much admired high prow of the ...”

“... Browning (re)constructed a classical epic in 12 books, a ‘novel-poem’ to rival his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, a historical romance to challenge Scott, an urban realist fiction to emulate Dickens or Balzac, a religio-philosophical-aesthetic treatise in the modern vein of the Higher Criticism. From the 1830s he had been a ...”

“... nature some of the finest qualities of the ruler’; Carlingford is her ‘kingdom’. Nancy, the cook, is taken for ‘her prime minister’. At various points Lucilla is likened to a general, a warrior and Joan of Arc. Waiting to spring a surprise, ‘Miss Marjoribanks was looking to the joints of her harness, and feeling the edge of her weapons.’ On ...”

“... wants to volunteer). In Old Filth, onboard ship, the officers threaten to make him and his friend cook: ‘You couldn’t do worse than this duff.’ In The Man in the Wooden Hat, he reminisces about the duff they presumably then made, ‘full of black beetles for currants’. Part of the fun of mixing their stories up together is that Feathers and Betty can ...”

“... of something horrible that was sticking to them. A spectacular daube at a dinner party, recipe by Elizabeth David but with a freehand addition by the cook, had it – lips this time pursed, thumb and forefinger connected to indicate perfection. A work of art, of course, had a je ne sais quoi, spoken with wide eyes and lips ...”

“... lover turns out to be a Spanish chef capable and indeed only too pleased to produce delicious pre-Elizabeth David food for the ravenous Radletts.13 February. ‘God’s honour’ we used to swear as boys. This remembered in the middle of an acute attack of arthritis pain this morning when I’m marooned on the sofa, cold, thirsty but unable to move. ‘I ...”

“... own polite loathing of her grand yet self-absorbed mother. In the mordantly sapphic novels of Elizabeth Bowen, older women are depicted as seductive and treacherous – enchanting sociopaths who leave the younger women who fall in love with them both shell-shocked and vengeful. (See in particular Bowen’s brilliant first novel, The Hotel, of 1927.) In ...”

“... In​ Olive, Again, her seventh book, Elizabeth Strout returns to her character Olive Kitteridge, a maths teacher in small-town Maine. A number of the chapters in Strout’s first, eponymous book about the character had already appeared in print as short stories before the novel’s publication in 2008, so that Olive Kitteridge is really half a novel, half a collection of stories; Olive, Again and most of Strout’s other books have the same hybrid form ...”

“... and cows’. Everywhere he journeyed impayable tourists amused and disgusted him. The American ‘Cook tourist’ he runs into on the Syrian plains ‘is sometimes a presbyterian, and interested in the facts of Christ’s biography, and the evidences of tradition; she – almost always it’s a she, three to one – talks about it at table d’hôte. She ...”

“... is he with this empty trope that he rearranges it several times within the next four pages. Elizabeth Taylor sitting up late at night is presumed to be ‘watching the falling stars with a certain sense of sympathetic identification’, while other guests show contempt on discovering that ‘Jagger, despite the waves of women he had rolled ...”

“... see Mrs Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones. Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their ...”