The quarter century or so before the outbreak of the First World War saw an extraordinary boom in the popularity and quality of short stories in Britain. This was the era of Sherlock Holmes, of Kipling's most famous stories, of Katherine Mansfield and Joyce's Dubliners. Some of the greatest writers of the period—particularly Conrad and James—found that the effort that went into their shorter works was more rewarded during their lifetimes than their now famous novels. Writers such as Chesterton, Beerbohm, Lawrence and Saki produced some of their greatest work.Short stories also provided a brilliant medium for experiment, and this generous and endlessly entertaining anthology includes fascinating examples of writers as varied as Rebecca West, H.G. Wells and Wyndham Lewis experimenting with what it was acceptable to write and how you could write it.