V.S. Pritchett's Englishness – the dependable Englishness of shabby, bumptious businessmen, shy wives, puritanical suburbanites and vinegar-tongued grandmothers – often came out in surprising ways. Though comfortably set in the dirty brick factories south of the river or the dreary commuter villages on the outskirts of London, a story will show a Russian sense of passing time or a French pertness, glow poetically like a Bruno Schulz, or wound with the terrible detail of a Danilo Kis. The innate knowledge of the insider is registered with the outsider's shocked vividness.

The fourteen stories of It May Never Happen show Pritchett's distinctive mastery. A fearful sailor falls into temptation ashore. An evangelist of the Church of the Last Purification arrives in a provincial town to demonstrate the non-existence of evil. A party of cyclists mistakes a private house for a pub. Two business partners fall out over money and a typist called Miss Croft with a 'small waist' and 'big red fingers'. And Aunt Gertrude breaks a mirror and remembers her girlhood.