Children behaving badly – the wonderfully wicked world of Saki
From our UK edition
‘Light literature’ has the potential to tell us more about the society that produced it than any number of more consciously cogitative productions. You can deduce a lot about the furious social mobility of the 1830s by reading the period’s terrible ‘silver fork’ novels describing proceedings in ducal drawing rooms. Fantasies of opulent misbehaviour abroad in the 1950s – Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong and the James Bond novels – reveal a great deal about people’s desires in a nation tired of bad food, bad sex and restrictions on spending. The dreams of the Edwardians during the most solid and commanding of eras ventured into contrariness, like a CEO addicted in private to sexual humiliation.
