Elizabeth Jane Howard was the author of fifteen highly acclaimed novels, including the five volumes of The Cazalet Chronicles, as well as After Julius, Falling, Getting It Right, Love All, and Odd Girl Out. The Cazalet Chronicles – The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and All Change – have become established as modern classics and have been adapted for a major BBC television series and for BBC Radio 4. She had one child, Nicola, and married three times – lastly to fellow author Sir Kingsley Amis. In 2000 she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, and in 2002 Macmillan published her autobiography, Slipstream. She died, aged ninety, at home in Suffolk on 2 January 2014.

Interesting and original . . . Howard has true imagination and a kind of sensuous power. She creates a wonderful atmosphere of uneasiness and oppression; she can also draw scenes with ironic brilliance: hers seems to me to be a remarkable talent.