J.I.M. Stewart is well known as an academic, a prolific novelist, short-story writer and author of thrillers under the penname of Michael Innes. This time he has his short-fiction hat on, and has produced five stories and a novella (of some sixty pages) for [The Bridge at Arta and Other Stories]…. [All of the stories] exhibit that expertise in construction which is a Stewart hallmark. The first story, 'The Bridge at Arta', is an ironic sketch of a widow meeting her first husband, whom she had divorced fifty years before. It affords Stewart the opportunity for wry reflections and juxtapositions, and although the characters are slight there is enough background interest to retain our attention. The same cannot be said of the long 'The Time Bomb', which takes ages to explode and does so only then like a damp squib…. The next story, 'The Little Duffer', about a boy wrongly accused of arson, is infinitely better since Stewart tries less hard to be clever and gives more time to developing the narrative. 'A Reading in Trollope', which concerns snobbery and family honour, would provide a pleasant diversion without the irritating academic overlay and too insistent irony. The final stories, 'The Chomsky File' and 'The Real Thing', are competent, artificial exercises in applied irony.

Stewart is an able writer, but this collection suffers from several drawbacks. It is too much a performance, an elaborate orchestration of language without consideration of aim or purpose; the characters are too limited—academics or businessmen (and boring as well); and the plots are mere artifices for making philosophical excursions into the lofty. More muscle and less posturing would help the collection away from the banal, the quaint and the 'historical—literary'.