"she was absurdly, extravagantly kind"

Film Just a brief return tonight to point you towards The Guardian's predictably excellent selection of short essays and whatnot about Nora Ephron in which different writers cover different aspects of her work.

Hadley Freeman has a career overview mainly covering the quality of her writing: "Honestly, the only thing funnier than When Harry Met Sally is the fact that the writer of Dead Poets Society – Dead Poets Society! – beat her to the Oscar that year."

Catherine Shoard expresses that career in clips: "She followed it with My Blue Heaven, a swerve into broader suburban satire, a Steve Martin vehicle about a mobster who is placed in a witness protection programme and relocated to the 'burbs."

Emma Brockes on Ephron as a person: "... when I moved to New York a year later, she took me for lunch and asked if I needed any introductions. She did this for lots of people I know, all journalists, writers and film-makers, all decades younger than her and with a generosity those fields don't exactly inspire. She had a reputation for sharpness, but my experience of Ephron was that she was absurdly, extravagantly kind."

Peter Bradshaw on the films: "The great scene in When Harry Met Sally when Meg Ryan demonstrates to a gobsmacked Billy Crystal that women can fake orgasm any time is the classic, almost quintessential Nora Ephron moment. It features smart, wiseacre conversation over lunch – and the lunch scene is a signature Ephron trope. It's about sex, and yet sex is ironised, miraculously made light of, made to seem funny; yet at the same time it's weirdly intimate."

Katy Stoddard collects together a wealth of archive cuttings from the file: "In 1983 Ephron published Heartburn, an autobiographical novel based on the breakdown of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post journalist. Prue Leith, writing in the Guardian, was impressed by the recipes scattered throughout the book."

Jenny Colgan talks about her feminism: "Loads of people might insist publicly that their favourite film is Citizen Kane, but come on, what are you more likely to find yourself rewatching for the 20th time at 11 o'clock on a school night? Yes, When Harry Met Sally, over and over again ("Baby fish mouth!"). As the writer Jon Hurwitz pointed out, it's hard to believe one of the greatest romantic movies ever made starred … Billy Crystal."

Amen to that, Jenny.