Triumph and tragedy, happiness and despair, joy and sorrow - through love and death and life lived to the full with a man who loved both alcohol and other women - for food-writer Elisabeth Luard, marriage to writer and sometime king of satire Nicholas Luard was never going to be easy. 'If a man can be judged by the company he keeps, so can a wife. It includes: Private Eye; Beyond the Fringe; Peter Cook; Lenny Bruce; Ken Tynan; Christine Keeler; Jack Profumo; The Rolling Stones; The Clermont Club; Johnny Lucan; and Jimmy Goldsmith...Nicholas, the man to whom I was married for forty years, was always ahead of the game. I started real life as a wife - but that's not how it ends.'In 1962 and just turned twenty-one, Elizabeth married Nicholas Luard, novelist, travel-writer and co-founder of Private Eye. Within six years, she had had four children and had moved to a remote valley in southern Spain - an adventure featured in her first autobiography, "Family Life". "My Life"...continues the story, telling of a forty-year marriage and the people and places which brought both sunshine and shadow.From her childhood in South America to the private gaming tables of Monte Carlo to a rebellious year as a debutante to bringing up a family in the wilds of Andalusia to a prizewinning career as a cookery-writer to the death of a beloved daughter from Aids to the grim days of her husband's liver-transplant through to the final reckoning - when a man who attracted success as easily as disaster refused to accept the consequences of what couldn't be changed. Yet this is a story of laughter and hope as well sadness - the healing power of children, the comfort of the kitchen table, the simple joy of making life work. "Family Life - Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing" was only the start of the story - this is the rest.