In 1976, V.S. Pritchett remarked that ‘what has always struck me in Irish writing is the sense of Ireland itself, its past or its imagined future, as a presence or invisible character.’ He added that in English short stories ‘the sense of England as an extra character is very rarely felt.’ Allowing Kipling as one obvious exception, Pritchett was too modest to mention what is probably the finest and most ambitious of his own longer stories, ‘When my girl comes home’. Here the complexity of the narrative and its oblique, carefully timed disclosures might seem to exceed the needs of an ostensibly simple subject – the return to Hincham Street of Hilda, who is thought to have suffered in a Japanese prison camp but had actually married a Japanese. Yet the responses of the various characters, including the elaborately drawn narrator, are conditioned, not only by their sustaining fantasies (‘We had all dreamt of Hilda in different ways’), but also by the challenging release from the habits and exigencies of wartime existence into a changed world: ‘we were all in that stage where the forces of life, the desire to live, were coming back’ (like Hilda). Their dreams, the shocks Hilda brings, and their subsequent adjustments, discriminations and evasions, project the ethos and changing mores of a whole community: England emerges as that ‘extra character’.

In his short fiction Pritchett is one of the English writers who most clearly exhibits the mark of Chekov's influence. The significance the Russian placed on the commonplace thing and apparently incidental aside is there, as is the deceptively simple expression of complex emotional processes. But the chief Chekhovian element which Pritchett makes his own is the way he subsumes himself within the story. To borrow from drama, Pritchett should be seen, not as a director with a signature style, but as an actor with the ability to lose himself entirely in whatever role he is playing. His stories situate the reader in direct relation to their characters, with little or no authorial filter between them.

These crosswinds of the humorous, the grave and the unexpected are all present in Pritchett's own favourite among his stories, When My Girl Comes Home, in which, following the end of the second world war, a family reappraises their situation when one of their number, Hilda, returns from an internment camp. The story is remarkable for the depth and variety of its psychological perceptions (not least its debunking of the stoical forbearance associated with the immediate post-war period). But its chief strengths are those flashes of arresting oddity that irrupt into its humdrum procession of crowded front rooms, sweaty dancehalls and innumerable cups of tea.

When her mother dies, Hilda describes her final cry as sounding "like a man selling papers". This is a phrase of rare brilliance, at once believable, poetic and indelible, that any writer would be proud to call their own.

Some of his characters are presented more as collisions of outward perceptions than anything else. Snapped at by a testy nurse, Beale, a patient nervously awaiting an x-ray, "makes a noise that is Beale"; in The Last Throw we are presented with "the fit of dry coughing that contained Chatterton", while in The Fall "the fragments called Peacock" coalesce into a chartered accountant's persona.

This 1961 story, more succinctly than any other, showcases Pritchett at his funny, moving, cruel, and engagingly strange best. If Pritchett had written only this he would be worthy of attention. Finding it nestled with so many other superb stories is an argument for greatness.