I'm not really a short story person, I prefer my fiction in either huge slabs or delicate but substantial c. 200-page novels, but I was interested in this collection because it contained a lot of stories that are rarely anthologised. Because I don't like the form very much, I wasn't terribly impressed, but I can appreciate that Byatt did choose very well and I was often surprised. The range of genres and styles is impressive; supernatural, bleak realism, lyrical modernism, satire, paranoid accounts of madness and altered states, uncanny science fiction, fairy-tale like experiments, even surrealism. My favourite stories were definitely the funny and satirical ones, especially the utterly and delightfully bizarre 'The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown' by G. K. Chesterton and (what I would say is the jewel of the whole collection), 'The Reverent Wooing of Archibald' by P. G. Wodehouse. The language is completely hilarious in this story, while its plot plays with the fairy tale or myth, all the while firmly planted in Wodehouse's signature world of empty-headed upper-class twits bumbling about country houses and London clubs. In my opinion, it is pure genius. One story that I found absolutely terrifying was 'The Destructors' by Graham Greene, with its both incredibly mundane and infinitely menacing portrayal of evil. Other stories that I loved were 'A Tragedy in Green' by Robert Firbank, 'An Englishman's Home' by Evelyn Waugh (of course), 'The Troll' by T. H. White, and 'Solid Geometry' by Ian McEwan. So except for the choice of Virginia Woolf's 'Solid Objects' over her other shorter fiction (such as 'A Haunted House') and the inclusion of certain authors that I think ought to be consigned to oblivion (namely Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley and Angela Carter), I thought this was a most excellent collection of stories, and Byatt's introduction works well to explain her choices and the thinking behind the collection.
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