In his delightful Collected Tales and Fantasies, the legendary eccentric English writer and composer Lord Berners (1883-1950) maintains a quiet grace, razor-sharp wit and unique sense of the absurd that is entirely sui generis. Berners offers an unforgettable cast of characters in these gem-like works of short fiction collected here. In Far from the Madding War, set in Oxford during wartime, the heroine, Emmeline Pocock, looks "like a nymph in one of the less licentious pictures of Fragonard, " while in Count Omega we read of composer Emanuel Smith (based on William Walton), who becomes infatuated with a young giantess named Madame Gloria, who is guarded by a jealous millionaire's eunuch, and whose virtuosity on trombone seems to offer the perfect climax to the symphony Smith is composing. In The Camel, a baroque Victorian tale with utterly macabre undertones, a humped quadruped takes a Fancy for a vicar's wife, while in The Romance of the Nose, Cleopatra herself appears. And these are only some of the fanciful creations that populate these literary treasures
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