A Corner of Paradise is the third volume of the memoirs of Brian Thompson, who lives in Oxford, and follows the award-winning Keeping Mum, about his wartime childhood, and Clever Girl, about growing up in the 1950s.

The subtitle, A Love Story (with the usual reservations), says everything about this wry, tender memorial to Elizabeth North, the partner Thompson cherished for almost half his life.

He tells her he would have liked to have created an empty cottage for her to which he would send daily cards and letters.

Instead he writes this moving account of their life together that begins with a conversation about vegetables in 1973 in a noisy supermarket car park on the Leeds ring road when she asks “Shouldn’t we kiss or something?”

They met in Oxford; he a tutor attending an educational conference at New College and she his brilliant student. Both had been through two friendly divorces, both had children, both were writers, Liz was a successful novelist, Brian a playwright. They each “came from the wrong tribe”: her father was an admiral while he came from a crazy Cockney family.

Their first shared home was a terrace house in Harrogate stuffed with children, pets, books and music.

In early 1990, after living together for 20 years, she reluctantly agreed to their acquiring a rundown farmhouse with “no enchanting features to the landscape” and “no single touristical attraction”.

Summers were spent renovating the sundrenched barren garden and the rat-eaten grenier with collapsing chestnut floors and lethal wiring, until slowly they became accepted by the eccentric locals.

They lived together for 37 years until her death in an Oxford hospital at the age of 78.

“Inside me” he writes “her presence persists, as real to me as my own existence.”

He gives us his beloved Liz, an elegant woman who loved life, gardens and her family yet was by temperament a solitary who, in the words of her obituary in the Guardian, “used her self-confessed failings as rich material for her novels”.

This tender memorial is told with fun, wit, gentleness and an honesty that does not shrink from the occasional bad temper and tetchiness.

At the heart of their relationship is his assessment: “You and me, girl. It’s only ever about you and me”, to which she typically replies: “with the usual reservations”.