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“... cigarette out!’ The soldier was perhaps the wittiest writer Britain had; his other name was Saki. Saki’s short stories take place in a world far from the Somme. It’s a world, like that of Oscar Wilde or P.G. Wodehouse, of silk curtains and silver tea sets, though Saki’s is ...”

“... Until recently, the only Saki story I had ever read was ‘Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped’. This is the one about the artist Mark Spayley who is wooing the daughter of Duncan Dullamy, ‘the great company inflator’, whose new breakfast food Pipenta ‘could scarcely be called a drug on the market; people bought drugs, but no one bought Pipenta ...”

“... Will Self would have us believe that a volume of Saki’s stories, chosen from eight miles of second-hand books in a New York store, saved his life. That, he says in his introduction to this collection, should not be confused with changing his life. Faced with a 22-city promotional tour of America for one of his books (‘Not, you might venture, a deathly predicament in and of itself – but how wrong you are’), he was able to set against the ‘terrifying rootlessness’ of the tour the ‘triumphantly rooted character’ of Saki’s stories ...”

“... A glass-fronted Regency bookcase in a corner of the London Library opposite the lift holds a collection of rare and beautiful editions of Edward FitzGerald’s poem, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Since its first publication in 1859, it has appeared in every size and shape, giant and toy, on vellum and silk, in fabulous bindings stamped with peacocks’ tails and nightingales’ eyes; it has been printed by masters for tiny private presses, handwritten and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s ...”

“... Rome, from Mount Aventine, which sold for £30.3 million three years ago. In his biography of Saki, whose real name was Hector Hugh Munro, A.J. Langguth asserted that ‘another of Hector’s military relatives had also perished in India when a tiger ate him.’ It has been suggested that the victim was Saki’s ...”

“... sales talk obscures the true pleasure of the text, which lies in its evocation of the world of Saki and Rudolph Rassendyll and Fouche d’Otrante and Fratting und Pullitz and (my darling among the entries) Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, not by any means to be confused with Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. Saki was especially good ...”

“... was also the product of an unhappy childhood, but one bent on revenge rather than consolation. Saki published his astringent collection of short stories, The Chronicles of Clovis, in 1911. They were epigrammatic, politically conservative, witty and brutal. Saki was to be a model as well as an influence on Coward, one he ...”

“... nightmare. Even incidentally, there’s a broad, unlikely set of references to literature – to Saki and John Fowles and Gatsby’s ‘old sport’. In more detail, a character called Clem Snide does a Sam Spade impression and spends his days checking into Hiltons on a headless-body murder investigation. The case involves drugs, black magic and an Egyptian ...”

“... I think, with the whole great wheeze and jape element in Edwardian literature (W.W. Jacobs, Saki, Kipling). It is interesting that his descendant, Adrian Mole, is more respectable, not less, than the society he lives in. As a Terror, William has been thought to owe something, or a good deal, to Booth Tarkington’s Penrod Schofield. But Richmal, who was ...”

“... had succeeded in such an enterprise? We would naturally feel that the sentiments that Saki has the cat Tobermory express could not with equal appropriateness have been imputed to a dog, nor the interior monologue Tolstoy imputes to the hound to a cat, but what can we infer from their appositeness? May we not be in the realm of ‘If Goofy could ...”

“... for this public-school boy, separated from his parents, suffering under aunts (like Kipling and Saki), put into a bank instead of going to university, bossed around by Germans, British patriots and ‘Jewish philistines’. Probably Benny Green is right to be so cross. Perhaps the whole nasty business of the ‘Nazi-collaborator’ accusation stems from the ...”

“... his life. So they sat in that room, reading poems by Longfellow or Tennyson, or short stories by Saki, Binoy the least interested among them, for his favourite subjects were arithmetic and art, and his favourite pastime, football. But it said something for their affection for this man, who sat studying their answers, that even Binoy had begun to show signs ...”

“... content in the uplifting style. Equally, her manner sometimes reminds me of the stories of Saki. This gives me great pleasure; it has been long since I so much relished the savour of writing. At the same time, it raises misgivings, puritanical no doubt, about the appeal of style at the expense of matter. Those who write with such panache, such ...”

“... or anyone else out of it. His theories are of the soft baggy sort which can contain any evidence. Saki, Kipling and P.G. Wodehouse were all separated from their parents when children. ‘As a result all three suffered subsequently from difficulties in making close relationships and tended to show more affection towards animals or children than they were able ...”

“... There might have been room for Housman’s ‘The pen is mightier than the wrist,’ given that Saki is allowed to say that ‘The English have a proverb, “Conscience makes cowboys of us all,” ’ and that the Sphere is allowed to bend another ‘coward’ proverb upon Noel Coward. Aldous Huxley (‘When Greek meets Greek ...’) here speaks of ‘the ...”