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Speaking at yesterday's Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch in Harrogate, Ms [Angela Huth] explained: \"There's a scene where a bomb drops on a cow and kills it. They wanted to put this in the film and asked if I would like to see the cow - all Pounds 6,000- worth of rubber of it. Apparently they're not allowed to use real dead cows.\"

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Chris Pomlett is excellent as the trapped [Tom Adderly], while Sheila Grew displays a range of wonderful expressions in the role of his wronged wife, Alice.

The current Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Rev Richard Harries, will not live in the house because he is retiring in June. But his successor, yet to be appointed, will enjoy one of the largest private gardens in the city in addition to a magnificent set of high- ceilinged rooms ideal for entertaining, and huge bedrooms on two floors upstairs. There is also a wine cellar. The new bishop will, like all his colleagues, live rent-free, which is a just as well because mortgage repayments on a house the price of Pullens End would be more than pounds 16,000 a month; local estate agents estimate that it would cost pounds 9,000 a month to rent it on the open market. A bishop of the Church of England earns about pounds 40,000 a year.

This was 1978. [James] had spent his bachelor years well looked after in his college. I had had eight years of blissful solitude in a hidden corner of Wiltshire. A marital house in Oxford was required. Neither of us fancied north Oxford. And as I had a dread of city life, I dreamt of a new hidden place. This, plainly, was it. An acre and a half of garden and orchard, planted with magnificent trees designed by some imaginative Victorian to shelter an oasis of silence beyond the birdsong. All this just a mile from Magdalen Bridge, 10 minutes from the Dragon School, a five-minute walk to the bus to London. Inevitably, for those who live in a house for a long time, memories become jumbled between the rooms and the people and what has gone on in those rooms with whom. My study, my workplace, is my favourite room. It's where I'm mostly alone, in silence. It looks on to the tallest and most magnificent beech tree, I swear, in the whole of Oxfordshire. It towers over the mulberry tree which was badly wounded in a recent storm, but half of it still stands. On the lawn, a green woodpecker spends more time than in any tree, and muntjak deer dart about with one eye on the tulips. Upstairs, the master bedroom mimics the drawing room, light dancing through the three tower windows. To my husband's horror, I converted the next-door bedroom into a huge bathroom with enormous cupboards, so as not to spoil the panelling in the bedroom. So those who suffer the modern obsession with en-suite could be happy. There's an equally large bedroom, overlooking the orchard - with a whole wall of shelves to accommodate our daughter's vast collection of books - and adjoining bathroom.

As Angela Huth points out in her preface to this anthology, eulogies for the dead at funerals and memorial services are quite different from obituaries. Obituaries are balanced pieces of journalism about someone the writer may well not have known personally. A eulogy, on the other hand, is delivered by a friend of the deceased to an assembly of his or her other friends. The air is heavy with grief, and the eulogist seeks to assuage it by evoking the best and most endearing characteristics of the one who is gone. \"The nature of eulogies is to be emotionally charged,\" writes Huth. As the late John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, Oxford, said in his eulogy for Harold Nicolson, included in this book, \"if we can summon up an image of the friend we have lost and keep that image undimmed before the mind's eye, then we shall not have lost him altogether.\"

It was the publisher, John Murray, - not she - who chose to include [Angela Huth]'s own tribute to the widow of the late, great theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. \"They seemed to like it because it was one of the few eulogies to be done by a woman,\" she says. \"Alas, the business of giving eulogies seems to be an almost exclusively male preserve.\"

like someone with synaesthesia, and the cover of this book is suitably vibrant. The people in her stories are exceedingly sensitive to colour, especially when they are about to snap. A housewife feels a flood of pale yellow when she yields to her family: \"Most days Alice experienced these yellow sensations in some measure . . . They represented an inexplicable happiness that was her only secret.\" A middle-aged widow in France surveys fields of lavender: \"The idea came to me that all I had to do was take a couple of further steps to be consumed for ever by the blue of the valley.\" Raymond Carver thought that a short story should make the reader stop and consider it for as long as they took to read it. That didn't exactly happen here, but I did sigh between stories and once or twice blot an eye. [Angela Huth] inhabits all the lonely people with great compassion and makes them seem unbearably poignant. But she balances things delicately, introducing comedy at awful, unlikely moments.

Prodge, brother of [Nell], is another marvellous creation. At first, he looks as if he is hewn from the same wood as [George]; and that, in terms of romantic excitement, the novel is going to resemble a slow bicycle race. But the man has hidden depths. The scene where he starts throwing his weight about, having boldly purchased a black leather jacket, is a gem of comic observation. The descriptions of life in a run-down firm of solicitors - where the secretary, Miss Hollow, is addressed as plain Hollow by her Dickensian employers - are also good value.

'If I'm in a train carriage and I see someone coming in with a doll, I get up very quickly and edge my way out. I couldn't be in a train carriage with a child with a doll.' She has a daughter Candida, 34, by her first marriage to travel writer Quentin Crewe and 17-year- old Eugenie by her third marriage to Oxford don James Howard Johnston. Angela's father was film star and director Harold Huth, who had matinee-idol good looks. 'He was my absolute, total hero,' she says. 'He knew every word of Dickens off by heart, he could draw beautifully and had infinite charm. He was always surrounded by beautiful actresses who fell in love with him, and no, he wasn't immune.' Appropriately, Angela and I meet at the Ritz because it's her granny's old home. She points to the very table where she used to come as a child for duty lunches. Her granny had two millionaire husbands, owned the largest pearl in Europe, lived in a suite at the Ritz and sounds a monster.