The epigraph for Graham Swift’s third collection of short stories, a series of rueful reflections on nostalgia, comes from Herman Hupfield’s song ‘As Time Goes By’: ‘the fundamental things apply/As time goes by’. Since its appearance in Casablanca (1942) , Hupfield’s song has often been deployed to elicit sentimental longing. The stories here hark back to Swift’s earlier work, revisiting periods, settings and set-ups from his fiction: the Second World War, south London, groups of old men gathering in a pub. Swift’s books return again and again to the idea of a character reliving or recounting momentous events from their past. Tom Crick in Waterland obsesses over his childhood in the Fens; Bill Unwin in Ever After looks back on his life following a suicide attempt; Jane Fairchild in Mothering Sunday remembers how events on Mother’s Day in 1924 led to her becoming a writer. Almost all the stories in this collection depict characters engaged in wistful reminiscence; often, ‘fundamental things’ like kisses and sighs prove more formative than events of notionally greater significance.

In ‘Blushes’, a retired respiratory specialist volunteering to help with the Covid-19 response recalls how he blushed as he watched some cake crumbs fall down a woman’s cleavage at his tenth birthday party. Annie Stevens, preparing for her father’s funeral in ‘Hinges’, remembers ‘the first time she’d been attracted to – excited by – a grown-up man’. In ‘Black’, the daughter of a Nottinghamshire miner watches footage of the miners’ strike and thinks back to the time during the Second World War when she risked her father’s anger by sitting next to a black US Air Force engineer on a bus.

Swift’s characters, however drab their lives may seem, aren’t quite like the people W H Auden imagined in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, ‘eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’ while events of great moment take place in the background. They relate their own lives to the big