IN TIME to assure those whom St Valentine’s Day disappoints that they are not the first, and to remind all its readers of the vagaries of the human heart, Yours Always: Letters of longing, edited by Eleanor Bass, is an anthology underscoring “the painful underside of love”. The letters are introduced biographically and arranged under “Unrequited and Unequal Love”, “Conflicted and Condemned Love”, and “A Final Word”. Correspondents include Henry VIII (to Anne Boleyn), Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Andre de Dienes (to Marilyn Monroe), Churchill, Kafka, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Abelard and Héloîse, Graham Greene, Wilde, Vera Brittain, and Ted Hughes (Icon Books, £9.99 (£9); 978-1-78578-168-1).