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Blurb

Tales from the White Hart is a collection of short stories by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in the "club tales" style.
Thirteen of the fifteen stories originally appeared across a number of different publications. "Moving Spirit" and "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch" were first published in this book and hence presumably were written specifically for it. "Defenestration" rounds off the cycle of stories and explicitly mentions their book publication.
The White Hart is a pub where a character named Harry Purvis tells a series of tall tales. Incidental characters inhabiting the White Hart include science fiction writers Samuel Youd, John Wyndham aka John Beynon, and Clarke himself in addition to the narrative voice as his pseudonym Charles Willis.
The style and nature of the stories was inspired by the Jorkens stories of the writer Lord Dunsany, whom Clarke admired and with whom he corresponded, a fact humorously acknowledged by Clarke in his introduction to the first Jorkens omnibus volume.