This collection of stories and sketches is chronologically arranged. The first story Evelyn Waugh wrote when he was aged 7 years 1 month. It need never have been published; the Daisy Ashford aspect of Waugh we might at least have been spared. The other stories, which appeared originally between 1932 and 1953, are all amusing in diverse ways and to various degrees. The 1932 story “Cruise” comprises letters and postcards written by a middle-class ingenue on a Mediterranean cruise: rather dim wit, an occasional chuckle. “Bella Fleace Gave a Party” (1932) is richer in details of décor and temperament. It is the first of several stories in the book which are structurally alike, each leading the reader, more or less unexpectedly, to a surprise ending—a “gimmick” I believe it is called in other areas of the entertainment world—which sorts ill with the superb sophistication of the kind of story-telling we used to associate with the name of Waugh. Of these anecdotes by the Mayfair O. Henry the most interesting is the title story, “Tactical Exercise,” which must have proved a bit of a blow to many readers of Good Housekeeping, where it first appeared. “Mr. Loveday's Little Outing” (1935), a bland blend of the gruesome and the hilarious, comes closer to the authentic Waugh than any of the other stories.

The best of these pieces, however, is the longest: “Work Suspended” (1941), about 100 pages of a novel which was never finished. This is a charming fragment, abounding in wit and invention. But one agrees with the author: it was getting nowhere; the drift is delectable but unprofitable. The worst of the pieces is the most recently written, a would-be-macabre study of Welfare Britain in the next generation. “Love Among the Ruins,” published as a separate book in 1953, relates the romance of an incendiary orphan, reared at the expense and according to the wisdom of the State, and a ballet-girl with a golden beard. The blurb suggests that it is similar in tone to The Loved One. In tone, perhaps, but assuredly not in artistry. The Loved One, repulsive little creation though it is, is a deft narrative stylishly written. “Love Among the Ruins” is only nasty and proves conclusively what many of us have been suspecting about Waugh's work for some time: that satire generated by disdain is rarely first-rate.

This book, then, is minor Waugh. Nevertheless, it is more elegant and entertaining than the best that most other storytellers of the day can manage. Those who here meet Waugh for the first time will derive from Tactical Exercise an evening's diversion though they may not understand what all the shouting has been about. Those of us who used to do the shouting and who began—exultantly—buying Waughs is the vintage years of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies will be pleased, at all events, to round out our collections.