A good collection from sheer entertainment value, with no ""social significance"" nor particular timeliness. Brett Young --for the last third of the stories -- tapped his own early experience as a ship's surgeon, and the stories are a potpourri of personal experiences, strange characters and situations encountered on shipboard and in harbor, and stories of London, of South Africa, of the Continent. There are retired colonials, and there are German exiles, there are Englishmen upholding the empire in remote settlements, and so on. Try Cotswold Honey (the title story in the English edition), and Soul Overboard for essential flavor. Not up to his better novels.