[1] Besides his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was customary at the time, and then collected into several volumes), Munro wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire (the only book published under his own name); a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland); and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion and occupation of Britain.

The children were sent to Broadgate Villa, in Pilton near Barnstaple, North Devon, to be raised by their grandmother and paternal maiden aunts, Charlotte and Augusta, in a strict and puritanical household.

Hector followed his father in 1893 into the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma, but successive bouts of fever caused his return home after only fifteen months.

Munro started his writing career as a journalist for newspapers such as The Westminster Gazette, the Daily Express, The Morning Post, and magazines such as the Bystander and Outlook.

The series lampooned political figures of the day (Alice in Downing Street begins with the memorable line, "'Have you ever seen an Ineptitude?'"

In 1902 he moved to The Morning Post, described as one of the "organs of intransigence" by Stephen Koss,[5] to work as a foreign correspondent, first in the Balkans, and then in Russia, where he was witness to the 1905 revolution in St. Petersburg.

At the start of the First World War Munro was 43 and officially over-age to enlist, but he refused a commission and joined the 2nd King Edward's Horse as an ordinary trooper.

[9] After his death, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his papers and wrote her own account of their childhood, which appeared at the beginning of The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924).

[10] In 2021, Lora Sifurova, looking through the Morning Post and other London periodicals in Russian archives, rediscovered seven sketches and stories attributed to Munro or Saki.

[11] In 2023, Bruce Gaston rediscovered a Clovis sketch, "The Romance of Business", published as part of an advertisement for Selfridge's in a 1914 issue of the Daily News and Leader.

[13] Much of Saki's work contrasts the conventions and hypocrisies of Edwardian England with the ruthless but straightforward life-and-death struggles of nature.

[14] Writing in The Guardian to mark the centenary of Saki's death, Stephen Moss noted, "In many of his stories, stuffy authority figures are set against forces of nature—polecats, hyenas, tigers.

[15] "The Interlopers" is a story about two men, Georg Znaeym and Ulrich von Gradwitz, whose families have fought over a forest in the eastern Carpathian Mountains for generations.

"Gabriel-Ernest" starts with a warning: "There is a wild beast in your woods …" Gabriel, a naked boy sunbathing by the river, is "adopted" by well-meaning townspeople.

The story includes many of the author's favourite themes: good intentions gone awry, the banality of polite society, the attraction of the sinister, and the allure of the wild and the forbidden.

Lady Carlotta decides not to correct the mistake, acknowledges herself as Miss Hope, a proponent of "the Schartz-Metterklume method" of making children understand history by acting it out themselves, and chooses the Rape of the Sabine Women (exemplified by a washerwoman's two girls) as the first lesson.

Youthful inventiveness finds a way, however, as the boys combine their history lessons on Louis XIV with a lurid and violent play-story about the invasion of Britain and the storming of the Young Women's Christian Association.

The niece tells him that the French window is kept open, even though it is October, because Mrs. Sappleton believes that her husband and her brothers, who drowned in a bog three years before, will come back one day.

Saki's recurring hero Clovis Sangrail, a clever, mischievous young man, overhears the complacent middle-aged Huddle complaining of his own addiction to routine and aversion to change.

The baroness immediately claims the corpse as her beloved dog Esmé, and the guilty owner of the car gets his chauffeur to bury the animal and later sends her an emerald brooch to make up for her loss.

He invents a religion in which his polecat ferret is imagined as a vengeful deity, and Conradin prays that "Sredni Vashtar" will deliver retribution upon De Ropp.

At a country-house party, one guest, Cornelius Appin, announces to the others that he has perfected a procedure for teaching animals human speech.

"An archangel ecstatically proclaiming the Millennium, and then finding that it clashed unpardonably with Henley and would have to be indefinitely postponed, could hardly have felt more crestfallen than Cornelius Appin at the reception of his wonderful achievement."

His fellow house party guest, Clovis Sangrail (Saki's recurring hero), remarks that if he was teaching "the poor beast" irregular German verbs, he deserved no pity.

Actors involved included Mark Burns as Clovis, Fenella Fielding as Mary Drakmanton, Heather Chasen as Agnes Huddle, Richard Vernon as the Major, Rosamund Greenwood as Veronique and Martita Hunt as Lady Bastable.

Jonathan Pryce read five short stories, “The Music on the Hill”, “Sredni Vashtar”, “The Penance”, “Gabriel-Ernest” and “The Hounds of Fate” as part of the British children's supernatural television series Spine Chillers broadcast by BBC1 in 1980.

[21] Who Killed Mrs De Ropp?, a BBC TV production in 2007, starring Ben Daniels and Gemma Jones, showcased three of Saki's short stories, "The Storyteller", "The Lumber Room" and "Sredni Vashtar".