Word: munro
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Ancients described the tiny, sweet-singing nightingale as Vox et praeterea nihil (voice and nothing else). For more than half a century that is how it has been, too, with Hector Hugh Munro, the marvelous miniaturist who wrote under the name of Saki. His voices, silly and silky and sometimes tinged with savagery, were familiar and extravagantly praised. One belonged to a popinjay character called Reginald, who discoursed in a series of semiprecious mots: "I hate posterity. It's so fond of having the last word." Another was Clovis Sangrail, a young man much given to the kind...
...Munro, except for some biographical notes by his sister Ethel, almost nothing was known. A.J. Langguth, 48, a novelist and an ex-New York Times correspondent in Saigon, now offers the first full biography. As biographer-critic, he proves knowing, balanced and blessedly brief...
...that once dared not speak its name. Saki, in fact, never mentioned it. His sister merely refers to his habit of sharing digs with young men as "chumming." In the biographer's view, however, being a prey to lusts that could have landed him in jail helped make Munro an outsider. Early on the aunts taught him to hate people like themselves, who were unkind to animals and children, and to see lying and imagination as the only power the weak and clever have over the strong and dull. Many of his best stories, The Penance, for instance...
...plus a raw strain of patriotism, kept trying to break through the veneer of satiric wit and comic, cultured urbanity that made him celebrated as man and writer. Langguth notes that he knew "the frustration of an adventurer's soul locked in the body of a clerk." Soon Munro left London again to become the Morning Post's correspondent in the Balkans, covering the bloody rivalry between Turks and Bulgars. He moved on to St. Petersburg, witnessing the march on the Winter Palace in 1905 and savage reprisal by Tsar Nicholas' Cossacks. Munro was a fearless reporter...
...second result was his second (and last) novel, When William Came, an unsuccessful but percipient fantasy written in early 1913, about what England would be like under German occupation, and how a flabby society full of jokesters, hucksters and aesthetes would adapt to it. The third result was Munro's dramatic enlistment as a private soldier when the fighting broke...