Ice House of the Mind is the third of this series of Stories and Sketches. It contains the collections, His People, Faith and Hope, published between 1906 and 1910, which present a typical mix of Cunninghame Graham's stories set in widely separated locations and drawing on his vast experience of life in different classes of human society. The stories are suffused with Cunninghame Graham's striking blend of the elegiac mood and unsentimental realism. "All that we write is but a bringing forth again of something we have seen or heard about. What makes it art is but the handling of it, and the...

Fire from a Black Opal is the fourth of this series of Stories and Sketches. It contains the collections, Charity, A Hatchment and Brought Forward, published between 1912 and 1916, immediately prior to and during the First World War. Cunninghame Graham was by now in his sixties, yet many of the stories demonstrate his amazing powers of recall for the experiences and feelings of his youth. Equally the later stories reveal a close empathy with the terrible demands that the war was making on people of different nations. "Honour and virtue do not of necessity take with them charity; neither can...

This fifth and final volume of Cunninghame Graham stories and sketches brings together the three collections he published in the last decade of his life. Redeemed, and Other Sketches appeared in 1927, followed in 1933 by Writ in Sand, and in 1936, the year of his death, by Mirages. There is a sense of winding down in the pieces presented. The characteristic Graham astringency and irony are less intense, and there is more conventional sentiment. However, some of the familiar targets for his distaste and anger are still being picked off. Graham shows himself to be fully alive to the...