PETER HITCHENS: So sorry, Your Majesty, but I have had my first Covid vaccination for wholly selfish reasons. I did not do it for the good of others but for my own convenience.
Saki s bitter satire captured the best and worst of the pre-War generation
A brave patriot and witty writer, but also a misanthrope and antisemitic bigot, Hector Munro remains a troubling figure
12 December 2020 • 12:00pm
Next Friday is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the writer Hector Munro, or Saki. His nom de guerre was that of the “cypress-slender Minister of Wine” in Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Munro’s mother died in his infancy. He was brought up humourlessly by two maiden aunts (maiden aunts would often be victims of hideous pranks, or worse, in his stories). He joined the Burma police but was driven home by malaria. He became a journalist but his creativity was too expansive for the restraints of that trade. He was homosexual at a time when that meant isolation, and that, too, surfaces in his writings.