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“... her own phrases her own way’. But the publisher of In the Ditch, Barrie & Jenkins, home to P.G. Wodehouse, rejected it, and the manuscript languished, partly because of those phrases, some of them in the Igbo language she’d grown up speaking. (This wasn’t the only reason: Emecheta’s prose isn’t polished and her plots can be jerky.) She took a job as ...”

“... but his handicap of six makes him superior to other obsessive literary golfers such as P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, and only a little inferior to Malcolm Lowry and Patrick Hamilton, who were golfers as well as drinkers of championship class. This devotion to sport went with a declared aversion to women and, at this stage, to sex in any form. He told ...”

“... A sub-genre that has always been profoundly conservative (hence its popularity, up there with P.G. Wodehouse, in America) is reduced to editorialised sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto. Two coppers can’t sit down for a swift half without debating the morality of capital punishment. (‘I happen to believe that the death penalty does deter, so ...”

“... in power’. He loves several of Britain’s legacies to his country – tea, cricket and P.G. Wodehouse – but not the one that most Brits are proudest of, the parliamentary system. He is no more enamoured of the political export many Indians are proudest of: Gandhi’s tradition of non-violent resistance. For many freedom-seeking nations, he ...”

“... and Ezra Pound, who was indicted for broadcasting from Italy; in Britain, John Amery and P.G. Wodehouse, who was cold-shouldered for giving a jaunty talk about life in his internment camp. Lord Haw-Haw was the most notorious radio traitor of all, and many British people, in the charged atmosphere of the postwar months, seemed untroubled that he would ...”

“... of a confidence trickster’. Others thought satire was the answer: the War Office proposed P.G. Wodehouse as Lord Haw-Haw’s antidote, a large irony given Wodehouse’s career after being captured by the Germans in France (where he’d been living when war broke out) as a colleague of Joyce’s on the German side. A good ...”

“... the shooting of A Private Function. Today’s handler, though, seems sensible and (unlike the pig handler) unopinionated and since Ayesha doesn’t have anything taxing to do in the way of acting, confines himself to making her and Clementine comfortable on a bed of hot-water bottles.25 October. At noon comes Paul Hoggart to record some impressions of his ...”

“... engaged to be married’ is a representative gag. Waugh described the book as ‘rather like P.G. Wodehouse’, but the running joke is much more scarifying than that, involving the real possibility of harm and what should properly be hair-raising emotional carelessness: ‘Anyway, we aren’t engaged any more, are we – or are we?’; ‘I’ve known her ...”

“... is a means of self-definition, a route to status, to MBE or DBE. One of several reasons why P.G. Wodehouse is rather a subversive writer is that much of his best work (he worked assiduously all his long life, and loved it) presents characters who don’t work and don’t mind – who devote themselves totally to golf, for instance, in a pastoral community of ...”

“... hospitality for some fictitious Germans – takes considerable comic pains to prevent it. Mistress Page wants the Frenchman to marry her daughter, Anne, and although her husband, George, would prefer the upper-class twit Slender as a son-in-law, and Caius has a second rival in the person of the broke but ultimately successful courtier Fenton, no one expresses ...”

“... effect in a given context. It assumes a unitary world, a kind of dark equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse’s sunny one, in which everything goes according to nightmare plan. Waugh was a great admirer of Wodehouse, and it has often struck me that his novels, particularly A Handful of Dust, use the same formula the other ...”