All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other peoples'. Saki (H.H. Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story.

His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection includes Sredni Vastor and The Unrest Cure. 'We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart'