Well-remembered friends - Angela Huth

A fascinating collection of memorial addresses on celebrated lives including WH Auden by Stephen Spender, Peter Cook by Alan Bennett, Kingsley Amis by Martin Amis, Stanley Matthews by Jimmy Armfield, John Thaw by Tom Courtenay and many more

The eulogy is a literary form like no other: to compress a lifetime into minutes, to summon the person, what they meant to their friends, colleagues, and sometimes a wider context, to be moved to grief, laughter, sadness and fond memories, to mix praise for virtue with the acknowledgement of foibles, to choose a few anecdotes form the hundreds available, is a very different art to that of the dry obituarist.

Angela Huth has collected come of the sparkling examples of the form - by or about writers, politicians, actors, sportsmen, academics, and, in some cases, unknown but well-remembered friends.