Wonderful, forgotten, short stories by the man John Galsworthy described as 'one of the best short-story writers of all time.' Some are hilarious, some poignant; among them - long out of print until now - is the story James Hilton named his 'favourite short story.' Many are about World War I and its aftermath. All make compulsive reading.

In 1837, the power of Daniel O'Connell's oratory focused the attention of Europeans on Ireland. They were horrified at what they saw there. The Irish poor - a third of the population - had no food except the potatoes they grew, and not enough clothing to cover themselves. They went hungry for two months of the year, and half-naked for all the year. Yet this would be their last 'good' decade before more than a million of them would vanish into unmarked graves in the 1840s. The idealistic young Baron Eotvos - a humanitarian and already a much-praised poet - struggled to understand how...