Take a look at the shelves of a second-hand bookshop or, even more mournful, the library of a country hotel with pretensions. It’s where books go to die, standing unread and unremarked upon bookshelves, their authors’ names slowly fading. It’s an achievement in itself to get a book published but… then what? A career, if you’re lucky, writing, but those melancholy shelves tell the likely truth: most writers are forgotten as completely as most books.

So, in that respect, Stella Gibbons is luckier than most of us. Cold Comfort Farm, possibly the funniest book I’ve ever read, means that she stays in print and thus, in literary terms, alive. And, being alive, publishers have cast through her back catalogue and hung a collection of short stories on Gibbons’ brief return visit to the Starkadders’ farm.

It’s the other stories that impress here, though. They’re an insight into a vanished Britain, an England and English banished by the cultural revolution of the last few decades: repression and restraint, propriety and prudishness, and the smart, usually literary, set that pioneered the revolution: as complacent and self-obsessed group of people as one could imagine.

Without Cold Comfort Farm, this book would never have been republished. But Gibbons lives on, and worthily so.