A Landscape Painter Book

Given that this volume of short stories was published after Saki's death during the First World War, I suspect that it comprises various items that he perhaps did not rate as highly as some of his better known stories.

There are still lovely Saki moments of course: a description of members of the Salvation Army as "spruce and jaunty and flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions." In another story, about a young man whose female relatives thought it was time he was married: "His most innocent flirtations were watched with the straining eagerness which a group of unexercised terriers concentrates on the slightest movements of a human being who may be reasonably considered likely to take them for a walk."

In particular I liked the stories "Shock Tactics" and "The Occasional Garden". Definitely worth reading if you are a Saki fan, but if you haven't tried him before, read "The Chronicles of Clovis" or "Beasts and Superbeasts" to enjoy him at his most glorious.