Short-story collections are always a grab-bag of wildly different material, but this collection is unusually consistent and unusually good. Of note: Frances Towers' "The Little Willow" does a glorious job with its secondary characters; Evelyn Waugh's "On Guard" contains the finest description of a nose that I have ever read; Graham Greene's "The Basement Room" is intricate and subtle; and V. S. Pritchett's "The Voice" and Nigel Kneale's "The Putting Away of Uncle Quaggin" are both deeply conventional but satisfying in their straight-forward virtues. I also really liked Elizabeth Bowen's "Maria," which concerns an amoral young woman plotting against an ascetic curate. Unfortunately, my subsequent attempt to read other things by Bowen was greeted with disaster; I managed to get only about two chapters into The Last September before I was compelled to chuck the book for being unbearably tedious. "Maria," in contrast, was acidly funny, and I would like to read more of Bowen in that vein. ( )