Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors--anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door--the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

    It is a precise, evocative but unsentimental account of a period of transition; it's an absorbing novel, and a useful piece of social history.'

    His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade which seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. Men at Arms is the first book in Waugh's brilliant trilogy, Sword of Honour, which chronicles the fortunes of Guy Crouchback. The second and third volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, are also published in Penguin Modern Classics.

    "It was a wedding Mysie once went to. The bridegroom never turned up and the bride swooned at the altar.""Have you practised swooning?"It's 1948 in the Scottish Highlands, with postwar austerity and rationing in full effect, but Mr and Mrs MacAlvey and their family and friends are too irrepressibly cheerful to let it get them down. There's Raine, newly engaged to the brother of a local farmer, and Cleo, just back from three years in the States, along with their brother James, married to neurotic Trina, who smothers their two oversheltered children. There are also three MacAlvey grandchildren, orphaned in the war, whose hilarious mishaps keep everyone on their toes. There are wedding preparations, visits from friends, an adventurous hike, and frustrated romance. But really the plot of the novel is, simply, life, as lived by irresistible characters with humour, optimism, and affection.

    

    She liked the simple things inlife - soft firelight and evenings at home. A quiet widow devoted to her only dear child, Sarah. Until she fell in with a fashionable crowd, going from party to party, trying things she would once have considered shocking and never quite thinking about the consequences. Why had she changed? And what was going to happen to her impressionable young daughter?Ann Prentice is in love with Richard Cauldfield and hopes for new happiness. Her only daughter, cannot contemplate the idea of her mother marrying again and wrecks any chance of her remarriage. Resentment and jealousy corrode their relationship as each seeks relief in different directions. Are mother and daughter destined to be enemies for life or will their underlying love for each other finally win through?

    A child's jealousy of his place in his mother's life erupts when his father comes home from the war, not to subside until a new baby arrives placing his father and him in the same position.'My Oedipus Complex' first appeared in 'Today's Woman' magazine.

    Only one author was named twice as having been too long neglected: Barbara Pym. Because of this, the late English novelist, whose books were out of fashion in the 1960s and early '70s, is now having a new popularity as a brilliant stylist whose comedies of manners have been compared to the works of Jane Austen." (from rear cover)

    But, of course, Lady Masters got things simply by always having had them and by taking it for granted that she always would have them. In Bramton Wick, the setting of Elizabeth Fair’s cheerful debut novel, tensions and resentments—not to mention romance—roil beneath the polite interactions of its charming and eccentric residents.There’s upper crust Lady Masters, taking the good things for granted but thoroughly cowed by her gardener. There’s Gillian Cole, a war widow, and her sister Laura, for whom romance may (or may not) be in the offing. There’s Miss Selbourne and “Tiger” Garrett, who met driving ambulances during the war (the first one, though Miss Garrett does get them confused). There’s Major Worthy, who is quite energetic for an invalid. And there’s the three Misses Cleeve, who are “all remarkably like toads” and who have a casual relationship with the truth.Furrowed Middlebrow is delighted to make available, for the first time in over half a century, all six of Elizabeth Fair’s irresistible comedies of domestic life. These new editions all feature an introduction by Elizabeth Crawford.“Miss Fair’s understanding is deeper than Mrs. Thirkell’s and her humour is untouched by snobbishness; she is much nearer to Trollope, grand master in these matters.”--Stevie Smith“Miss Fair’s first novel is not one of promise but of accomplishment. Good luck to her!”--John Betjeman“Deliciously malicious humour abounds.”--Vanity Fair

    Bates wrote after the second world war, and it was his own favourite among his Northamptonshire novels. The Northants setting becomes the background both ugly and beautiful for the story of a young girl, the daughter of a decaying aristocratic household, and her lovers, of which the most important is the narrator himself.Published in 1952, it is essentially an autobiographical novel, and, though much of his fiction reflects his own life and background, this probably contains more than in any other piece of fiction – That may explain why it is such a satisfying book. Bates spent a brief time as a reporter on the Northamptonshire Chronicle, and there are other echoes of the author’s personal experiences here in the character of the narrator, Richardson. Lydia, it seems, is based on, or was inspired by, a young lady he once glimpsed on Rushden railway station – "a tallish, dark, proud, aloof young girl in a black cloak lined with scarlet". Lydia in the story is the sheltered and selfish Aspen daughter, and the novel chronicles her affairs with Richardson and two of the other young men. It has been described as a novel of "a young man's struggle to understand and resolve himself to a formidable world of change and uncertainty”, and the novel ends in his committing himself to Lydia in a much more mature and lasting way than he could have done at the beginning of the story. The novel was serialised on television in 1976.

    Some are macabre, others have a lighter and more amusing touch, but every story stimulates the imagination and reveals the acknowledged master of the short story at his very best.SMETHERS is a travelling salesman for Numnumo, who make a relish for meats and savouries. He shares a flat with an Oxford graduate called Linley, who fancies himself as a detective and to whom Scotland Yard is inclined to turn if they encounter a particularly challenging mystery. When a pretty young girl disappears and her lodger is suspected of murdering her, two bottles of Numnumo relish are the only clues, and Smethers is sent to gather more information . . .Amongst the hundreds of fantasy stories for which the Irish dramatist, poet and writer Lord Dunsany became deservedly famous there was one solitary little book of detective stories. Selected by Ellery Queen as an ‘unequivocal keystone’ in the history of crime writing, this quirky collection is a mixture of the masterful and the macabre, a book that lovers of detective stories and tales of the unexpected will want to savour.

    It is told from the viewpoint of a nameless mountaineer whose best friend's wife disappears on a trip to climb the peak. It is based on the actual colony of Monte Verità in Switzerland which preached a return to nature.