A collection which starts rather dubiously with a few pages by Hazlitt, apparently wrenched out of context, and runs though the major Victorians (Thackeray, Trollope, Hardy, though not Dickens or George Eliot) to Kipling, Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett and so down to modern times. D.H. Lawrence is unavoidably included, along with Maugham, Virginia Woolf,
Elizabeth Bowen, Katharine Mansfield, V.S. Pritchett; moving on to more recent times, Sylvia Plath and Paul Theroux are both mildly surprising choices. The absence of the Brontes is rather puzzling, but then they were novelist-poets rather than story-writers. Aldous Huxley I could have done without.