From Work Suspended, where Plant, a writer of detective fiction, puts his incomplete novel in a drawer until such time as he can finish it, to Basil Seal Rides Again, in which the hero of Black Mischief defeats the children of the Sixties, this volume includes stories that encompass much of the social milieu of the 20th century.

Throws a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, this novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth 'in the bosom of a Christian family'.

In this deeply involved study of the German Upper Class before 1914 , Sybille Bedford has re-created a way of life in a manner that is absorbing, moving and sometimes very funny.

This is a wonderfully accomplished farce with the joke of using her own name in the title (Barbara Mary Crampton Pym). From that point she sails off into a wickedly comedic farce, focusing -- in recognisingly 'pym' fashion -- on the unsuitable romantic entanglements of a curate and a pretty young girl, both of whom live in the same rooming house, and a starry-eyed university professor and his ...

Originally written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette , this book presents stories that were intended for a provincial readership familiar with the pleasures and miseries of colonial life. It is about the barriers between the races, the classes and the sexes; and about innocence, not transformed into experience but implacably crushed.

Christopher Tietjens is the embodiment of an Edwardian English gentleman - his world is ordered, predictable, and hierarchical. His wife, Sylvia - beautiful, arrogant, reckless - is a symbol of the new times brought about by World War I. Their conflict is a chronicle of a family and an era.