The New York Times’s online archive contains a review from August 25, 1981 of A.J. Langguth’s biography of Munro. You can access it here.
Links
Interesting Literature’s ‘The 10 Best Saki Stories Everyone Should Read’
“A Library of Literary Interestingness”) has a top-ten list of Saki’s stories along with some short analysis and comments on their choices. The obvious ones are there (‘Gabriel-Ernest’, ‘Sredni Vashtar’, ‘Tobermory’, ‘The Music on the Hill’, ‘The Lumber-Room’) as well as some lesser known but worthy entries (‘Filboid Studge’! Yes!). I don’t completely agree with the choices made (‘The Jesting of Arlington Stringham’ has a good joke about rabbit curry but is otherwise only average Saki) but then again, isn’t the point of these lists that you can argue about them?
Agree/Disagree here:
The 10 Best Saki Stories Everyone Should Read
The Fashion for Turkish baths
Yahoo republishes an article in the Daily Telegraph about the Victorian bathhouse. While most of the article is about the fashion for orientalism in architecture and design in the nineteenth century, it does begin with a picture of the Jermyn Street Turkish bath where Saki set The Recessional’.
Turkish baths occur occasionally in Saki’s stories. (I speculated a bit about the reasons here.) The habit of going to such places also provoked the following bit of wisdom about human nature:
Spayley had grasped the fact that people will do things from a sense of duty which they would never attempt as a pleasure. There are thousands of respectable middle-class men who, if you found them unexpectedly in a Turkish bath, would explain in all sincerity that a doctor had ordered them to take Turkish baths; if you told them in return that you went there because you liked it, they would stare in pained wonder at the frivolity of your motive. (’)
Filboid Studge
Article link: https://uk.style.yahoo.com/curious-victorian-obsession-cleanliness-exotic-093234249.html
Notes on The Westminster Alice by Ruth Golding
Ruth Golding, who recorded a (free!) audio version of The Westminster Alice for the excellent website librivox.org, also recorded some accompanying explanatory notes for the general reader. They’re available in both audio and text form on her website and also on archive.org. You can also listen to them below.
Reblogged: A brief survey of the short story part 21: Saki
- from the Guardian newspaper website (click here to be redirected to the article).