How to stay married for 40 years - Elisabeth Luard

This isn't going to be easy. Not least since I've just swallowed a shard from a duck bone. Interviewing people in restaurants is always a mistake - they're just about to admit to killing their father or doing something unspeakable to their mother when the meringue arrives - and the Chuen Cheng Ku Chinese restaurant on the edge of London's Soho may be a bigger mistake than most as the waitress speaks hardly any English and I have only the haziest idea what I am eating.

But the food writer Elisabeth Luard was keen to get some lunch, so here we are, talking about her new memoir, My Life as a Wife, which scampers through 40 years of marriage to the racy Nicholas Luard, proprietor and saviour of Private Eye in its infancy, co-founder with Peter Cook of the pioneering early 1960s Establishment comedy club, travel writer, novelist, co-founder of the London marathon, conservationist, anti-apartheid campaigner, alcoholic, philanderer and all-round impossible husband.

Luard died of cancer in 2004. The book is a portrait of a marriage, and its opening nicely captures the ambiguity of the relationship. "This is the story of my life as a wife. Or how to stay married for 40 years without actually murdering your husband. A love story." The verdict, Luard tells me when I've extracted the duck bone from my throat, could have gone either way.