Super-Beast

'Magnificent . . . miraculous . . . one of the best literary biographies I have ever read' STEPHEN FRY'A quite extraordinary story, quite beautifully told' GYLES BRANDRETH 'Exquisite . . . A vivid and elegant record of a lost world' PHILIP HOARE 'Clear-sighted and delighting in equal measure' ELEY WILLIAMS'Wise, witty and wry - the biography that Saki, and all devoted Sakiphants, deserve' BEN SCHOTTThere has been no more mischievous an influence on the English comic imagination than that of Hector Hugh Munro, the enigmatic genius better known as Saki. His stories are among the wittiest ever written: dark satires of Edwardian society, populated by decadent dandies, cunning children and wild beasts. Their playful wickedness has inspired the work of everyone from P. G. Wodehouse to Roald Dahl, Noël Coward to The League of Gentlemen. But Saki is among the most mysterious and contradictory characters in literary history: conservative campaigner, courageous soldier, pioneer of the camp sensibility and a pagan lord of misrule. Leaving almost no letters or papers, he had an uncanny ability to disappear. In the first biography of Saki for nearly half a century, Oliver Soden follows the tracks of this rare beast, discovering much startling new material. This is a book as witty and adventurous as its subject, roaming from Edwardian drawing rooms to the Burmese jungle, from revolutionary Russia to the killing fields of the Somme. Saki is revealed as never before, in all his outrageous brilliance.