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“... novel The Camomile Lawn was set. As historical fiction A Sensible Life may well be compared with Elizabeth JaneHoward’s The Light Years, a narrative of events in 1937 and 1938 which is the first of a planned trilogy spanning the war years. Both like to drip-feed us with nostalgia, and neither is ...”

“... Elizabeth JaneHoward 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 ...”

“... he sets out to educate with his favourite records and books, beginning with The Secret Garden. Elizabeth JaneHoward does a good job where she can feel as confident in her values as Cecil Roberts. She enters with zest into the details of hairdressing or Gavin’s mother’s cooking. She is no less confident with ...”

“... disinterested championship of Aickman lasted for years and carried him to an interview with Elizabeth JaneHoward, co-author of Aickman’s first book, and to a reconsideration of the values of a certain kind of Englishness. ‘These people did what they wanted to do. They carried on when their work went out of ...”

“... about what we disapprove of in real life. The two Amises continued co-existing. When he married Elizabeth JaneHoward they went to live in a big house near Barnet, a matriarchal establishment largely run, it seemed, by his new mother and brother-in-law. Amis rejoiced in this set-up, which seemed to come quite ...”

“... London, the latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth JaneHoward, Amis’s second wife. The Huntington’s Rare Book Room closes for an hour at noon and most of its readers stroll across the gardens to a shaded outdoor restaurant. Amis would barely recognise as ...”

“... Women (1984) – about how all women are bitches – was coloured by his rancorous divorce from Elizabeth JaneHoward. Bradford’s Exhibit A, however, is ‘Letter to a Friend about Girls’ (‘After comparing lives with you for years,/I see how I’ve been losing’), which Larkin tinkered with endlessly but chose ...”

“... Amis finds room for another argument with himself about Israel, two passages (one reprinted) on Elizabeth JaneHoward, and a post-postscript describing a dream about her dog. Another difficulty is the range of Martin Amises on offer. Here he’s a distinguished, thoroughly normcore man of letters, there he’s a ...”

“... gap is not at all made up for by the ardent love missives with which, in the 1960s, he bombarded Elizabeth JaneHoward, who became his second wife. These seem forced and self-conscious but maybe they wouldn’t if we did not know how things turned out for these two lovers. After they have split up, ...”

“... of Harold and Essie Craxton, who tumbled up in a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth JaneHoward, who knew them all when she was young and later wove them into her Cazalet novels, described the Craxtons as exuding happiness like pollen, which rubbed off. The pianist Harold Isaacs remembered ...”

“... relationship was finally put under intolerable strain when Amis started an affair with the writer Elizabeth JaneHoward. Almost immediately, this affair threatened to be different from its innumerable predecessors because Kingsley fell passionately in love with Jane. Hilly finally ...”

“... and international and secular and religious events of these years. Anne Boleyn is beheaded. Jane Seymour becomes queen, has a son, dies. Abbeys are dissolved. The Plantagenet Pole family conspires against the crown. The rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace rises in the North, unhappy with reforms in the Church, and is put down. Henry VIII gets a ...”

“... vacuous feature film will be clogging up the multiplexes. In reworkings of the Tudor soap opera, Jane Boleyn is more often known as Jane Rochford, wife of George Boleyn, sister-in-law to Anne the queen. There are some lives we read backwards, from bloody exit to obscure entrance, and ...”

“... family both within the narrative and outside it. Howells’s letter to the magazine’s editor, Elizabeth Jordan, has not survived, but according to Jordan, it ‘almost scorched the paper it was written on’: ‘Don’t, don’t let her ruin our beautiful story!’ Howells’s original proposal for The Whole Family had devoted more attention to its ...”

“... sensitivity to people, and because of the sense of excitement he brought to everything he did’. Elizabeth JaneHoward, who had a brief affair with him, called him ‘a noble little goblin’. She wrote after his death that he was ‘entirely brave; had courage on every level, physical, moral and spiritual … His ...”