As an author, the pseudonymous Saki became famous for some two hundred sketches and stories, whose surreal wit released an intoxicating savagery into the drawing-room world of Edwardian society. Even now, they define the most playfully wicked currents in the English comic imagination.

As a man, however, Hector Hugh Munro had an uncanny ability to disappear. Pioneer of the camp sensibility, conservative moralist, aesthete, soldier, sinner, hero: the few papers left in his decimated archive seem to defy biographical coherence. Oliver Soden (Masquerade) follows the tracks of an elusive genius.