Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, literature, and related fields.

They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Among them is a newly acquired book that should be useful to TU students who are interested in literature, European history, sociology, and related subjects.

The Short Stories of Saki collects the works of Hector Hugh Munro, better known by the pen name Saki a British writer whose stories satirized Edwardian society and culture.

He was influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling and in turn influenced the writings of A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.

The TU Library collection includes books by these writers and also other books by and about Saki.

Here are some thoughts by Saki from stories and other writings, most of which are in the TU Library collection:

We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart.

• The Unbearable Bassington (1912)

“To have reached thirty,” said Reginald, “is to have failed in life.”

• Reginald on the Academy

Reginald, in his way, was a pioneer.

None of the rest of his family had anything approaching Titian hair or a sense of humour, and they used primroses as a table decoration.

It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.

• Reginald’s Choir Treat

And like every woman who has ever preached repentance to unregenerate youth, she dwelt on the sin of an empty life, which always seems so much more scandalous in the country, where people rise early to see if a new strawberry has happened during the night.

• Reginald’s Choir Treat

I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she’s so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.

• Reginald on Worries

Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people.

• Reginald at the Carlton

The revenge of an elder sister may be long in coming, but, like a South-Eastern express, it arrives in its own good time.

• Reginald on Besetting Sins

Madame was not best pleased at being contradicted on a professional matter, and when Madame lost her temper you usually found it afterwards in the bill.

• Reginald on Besetting Sins

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.

• Reginald on Besetting Sins

Women and elephants never forget an injury.

• Reginald on Besetting Sins

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.

• Reginald’s Rubaiyat

Poverty keeps together more homes than it breaks up.

• Esmé

“I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,” [Clovis] resumed presently. “They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There’s nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.”

• The Match-Maker

All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren’t respectable live beyond other people’s. A few gifted individuals manage to do both.

• The Match Maker

I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.

• Adrian

Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

• The Feast of Nemesis

Cyprian was a boy who carried with him through early life the wondering look of a dreamer, the eyes of one who sees things that are not visible to ordinary mortals, and invests the commonplace things of this world with qualities unsuspected by plainer folk – the eyes of a poet or a house agent.

• The Dreamer”

The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.

The animal which the Egyptians worshipped as divine, which the Romans venerated as a symbol of liberty, which Europeans in the ignorant Middle Ages anathematised as an agent of demonology, has displayed to all ages two closely blended characteristics — courage and self-respect. No matter how unfavourable the circumstances, both qualities are always to the fore. Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission to the impending visitation, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance. And disassociate the luxury-loving cat from the atmosphere of social comfort in which it usually contrives to move, and observe it critically under the adverse conditions of civilisation — that civilisation which can impel a man to the degradation of clothing himself in tawdry ribald garments and capering mountebank dances in the streets for the earning of the few coins that keep him on the respectable, or non-criminal, side of society. The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.

• The Achievement of the Cat

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

• Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)