Super-Beast: The Mysterious Life of Saki

In the silken, seductive, perilous literary world of Saki, wolves howl, cats speak, and epigrams are matters of life and death

In the silken, seductive, perilous literary world of Saki, wolves howl, cats speak, and epigrams are matters of life and death

Super-Beast: The Mysterious Life of Saki

D J Taylor at Literary Review: In some ways all you really need to know about Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916) can be gleaned from the short story ‘Sredni Vashtar’, first published in the Westminster Gazette in the summer of 1910. Conradin – Munro’s heroes nearly always have these hifalutin names – is a sickly small boy quartered on a tyrannical guardian called Mrs de Ropp. Denied much in the way of freedom or material comfort, in particular the ho…