The quarter century or so before the outbreak of the First World War saw an extraordinary boom in the popularity and quality of short stories in Britain. Fuelled by a large new magazine readership and vigorous competition to acquire new stories and develop the careers of some of our greatest writers, these years were ones where the normal rule-of-thumb (novels sell, short stories don't) was inverted. This was the era of Sherlock Holmes, of Kipling's most famous stories, of M. R. James, Katherine Mansfield and Joyce's 'Dubliners'.