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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 ...”

“... Camomile Lawn was set. As historical fiction A Sensible Life may well be compared with Elizabeth Jane Howard’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 poisonous. Both, too, tend to over-compensate for the human and ...”

“... Bateson, for whose intellectual originality I have an enormous respect, was a personal friend. Jane Howard’s book sets out to be a straight, warts-and-all biography. The author, who is not herself an anthropologist, is by no means starry-eyed about her heroine: nevertheless, as can be seen in the blustering way in which she dismisses Freeman’s ...”

“... out to educate with his favourite records and books, beginning with The Secret Garden. Elizabeth Jane Howard 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 good, worthy sentiments that wouldn’t disdain ...”

“... championship of Aickman lasted for years and carried him to an interview with Elizabeth Jane Howard, 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 fashion, when nobody was listening.’ Thinking ...”

“... we disapprove of in real life. The two Amises continued co-existing. When he married Elizabeth Jane Howard 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 naturally to him. Not in the least the squire or ...”

“... latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, 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 lunch the meal most of us eat here: nobody ...”

“... at all made up for by the ardent love missives with which, in the 1960s, he bombarded Elizabeth Jane Howard, 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, Howard is routinely referred ...”

“... about how all women are bitches – was coloured by his rancorous divorce from Elizabeth Jane Howard. 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 not to publish because, he said, ‘the ...”

“... room for another argument with himself about Israel, two passages (one reprinted) on Elizabeth Jane Howard, 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 feral, muscle-flexing cult writer, and ...”

“... was finally put under intolerable strain when Amis started an affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard. Almost immediately, this affair threatened to be different from its innumerable predecessors because Kingsley fell passionately in love with Jane. Hilly finally walked out on him; he and ...”

“... Harold and Essie Craxton, who tumbled up in a ramshackle household in St John’s Wood. Elizabeth Jane Howard, 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 overcrowded Acomb Lodge as ‘a very strange ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... craft.So although the pictures here, drawn from the collection of the British Library and the Howard and Jane Ricketts Collection, do show Kipling’s India – ethnographers and travellers photographed the landscapes, types and tribes which Kim encounters on his journeyings – their monochrome precision is miles away ...”

“... 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 ...”