The album was beautiful, made of red leather with gilt-edged pages. My late mother, Linda Kelly, who was a historian and lover of the 18th century, with biographies of Sheridan, Tom Moore and Talleyrand to her name, had been given it by her mother-in-law shortly after she got married in the early 1960s.
She decided it was too precious to fill with anything so prosaic as recipes or addresses. She chose instead to keep it as a commonplace book - filled largely with poetry, and with
