Neville and June Braybrooke enjoyed not merely the closest of marriages but also the closest of literary partnerships. They rarely spent a night away from each other; each rarely wrote a sentence without the other reading it.

Under the pen-name Isobel English, June published, at widely spaced intervals, three novels and a volume of stories, which, impeccably imagined and elegantly written, won her the allegiance of a small but enthusiastic band of readers.

Neville was a man of letters of the old school – an adventurous magazine editor and publisher in his youth, a conscientious and perceptive literary critic in his later years.