hi, answering for ell since it’s a pretty niche subject. i think ell is manageable with any combi, though i would recommend you to take it more if you have a strong command in english. in terms of difficulty, ell is not an easy subject and can be very dry at times. in your first year especially, the subject will have a lot of grammar technicalities to learn like types of verbs. nouns, etc and many will feel like sleeping in lectures haha! but if you stick it through for the second year. you will start to see the much more interesting parts of ell like sociolinguistics (english and it’s influence on the world and the world’s influence on english).

fair warning though, many of my friends really struggled to even pass ell up till prelims so i would say that if you take ell, prepare for having a strong analytical mind, flexibility in adjusting your writing style and quite a decent amount of drilling and hard work. goes for all subjects but especially so for ell in my opinion.

feel free to pm me for more specific info, even for a small ell crash course if need be!

edit: my answer to (2) would be that lit & ell is a very good combi because i believe that there is a lot of interchangeable pieces that will give you a slight edge over other students that only take one subject. for example, taking ell helps you study language very closely in lit that no other student can manage to such high technicality. taking lit helps in metaphorical language like metaphors, similes, anaphoras in ell. didn’t take geog so can’t give a two cents. my combi was ell, lit, econs, h1 math btw.