The short stories of Saki - the intriguing pen name of Hector Hugh Munro - are among the wittiest in the language. Dark satires of Edwardian society, populated by decadent dandies, wild beasts and cunning children, they are the source of the most playfully wicked currents in the English comic imagination, inspiring figures 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.