Colonel Julian and Other Stories

London: Michael Joseph, 1951 (June); Boston: Little, Brown and Company (An Atlantic Monthly Press Book), 1952.
Dedication: "To M.J. [Michael Joseph] with affection and gratitude."

Bates first new collection of stories since the war includes four stories set in Asia and two others dealing with the war and its effects. Five tales, including two in the Uncle Silas series, are set in the English countryside and one ("A Christmas Song") introduces the town of Evensford, the Rushden-like setting of Bates's 1952 novel Love for Lydia. Two stories ("The Park" and "The Little Farm") were written in 1941 and another ("Joe Johnson") was written in 1944; the remainder stem from 1945 on, with fully nine of the fifteen selections written between 1949 and 1951. Bates thought highly enough of the collection to include six of the fifteen tales in his 1963 collection of thirty-five "best" stories.

The New Statesman and Nation criticized the collection for its characters — "unconscious masochists" who "are alike in extracting the very worst out of love" and for sloppy writing. The New York Times calls the collection "distinguished...these stories make the work of many of [his] contemporaries appear, in comparison, either amateurish or pretentious...Mr. Bates avoids the sensational or the melodramatic; through an unerring selection of the exact gesture or thought or act or incident, he reveals the very essence of his characters' thwarted personalities."

Reviews:

• John O'London's Weekly (August 3, 1951, p. 474, Walter Marsden, attached)
• New Statesman and Nation (July 21, 1951, p. 79, John Richardson, attached)
• New York Times (April 6, 1952, p. BR6, William Peden, attached)
• Saturday Review of Literature (May 24, 1952, p. 23, Dunham Curtis, attached)
• The Spectator (July 6, 1951, p. 43, Barbara Worsley-Gough, attached)
• Times Literary Supplement (June 29, 1951, p. 401, Anthony Dymoke Powell, attached)
• Punch (July 11, 1951, p. 52, attached)
• Daily Telegraph (June 29, 1951, p. 6, John Betjeman, attached)
• Illustrated London News (August 4, 1951, p. 197, K. John, attached)

Contains: The Little Farm, Colonel Julian, Time Expired, The Lighthouse, Joe Johnson, The Park, Sugar for the Horse, The Flag, No More the Nightingales, The Bedfordshire Clanger, A Girl Called Peter, The Major of Hussars, Mrs. Vincent, A Christmas Song, The Frontier. ebook edition (Bloomsbury, 2016) also contains For Valour.