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“... Lying in bed with a cracked rib, I have been much consoled by these genial books about Wodehouse. The only dangerous one was Wodehouse on Wodehouse, since I was compelled to laugh aloud, boyishly, provoking the old knife-in-kidney sensation. Should any other member of the Ukridge idiot school chance upon this review, after being tipped off his bike by a London omnibus, let him heed this warning, as he lies in bed with his cracked specs and cracked rib ...”

“... and ended up by describing an Armenian wheelbarrow. That is how it was in the bar parlour of Wodehouse’s Angler’s Rest: ‘In our little circle I have known an argument on the Final Destination of the Soul to change inside forty seconds into one concerning the best method of preserving bacon fat.’ There is more than a touch of this creative ...”

“... We know from his immense correspondence that P.G. Wodehouse was at once omnivorous and discriminating in his reading (garbage in; synthesis out – a good maxim for any young reader-for-pleasure setting out on life’s road). He cited authors as various as Lion Feuchtwanger and Rudyard Kipling, and didn’t bluff about a book he hadn’t read ...”

“... I have had, as a holiday task, to cut the sixty-five-thousand-word P.G. Wodehouse novel Quick Service, published in 1940, down to about twenty-five thousand words for a BBC Radio Book at Bedtime. Ten periods of 14 minutes, nine of them to start with a minute or so of re-cap of earlier chapters, and all except the last to end, preferably, at a gasp-moment, to encourage listeners to switch on again tomorrow night ...”

“... to Mexico with his archaeologist wife, was a copy of Carry On, Jeeves. I had never heard of P.G. Wodehouse and racing through these stories of a master and his manservant I was surprised to find that, so far as I could tell, they were seriously funny and devoid of serious meaning. There was no more Wodehouse at home; my ...”

“... but, on reflection, surprisingly accurate. Waugh, in his black style, had no more humour than P.G. Wodehouse in his rosy style. Waugh deeply admired Wodehouse, and read and re-read him all his working life. But humour in fiction is about an interest in real people, and Waugh had no such interest. Neither, probably, had ...”

“... their own dreams and vanities: their great hearts were not on display. Did Wittgenstein read P.G. Wodehouse? Probably not, but had he done so he might have got on with him very well, as he did with the conventions of early cinema. With such things you knew where you were, and a philosopher likes that: Gilbert Ryle, so it is said, thought Schopenhauer and ...”

“... stories take place in a world far from the Somme. It’s a world, like that of Oscar Wilde or P.G. Wodehouse, of silk curtains and silver tea sets, though Saki’s is populated not only with tyrannical aunts and obtuse majors, but also with tigers and woodland gods. In ‘Sredni Vashtar’, a boy worships a ferret as a god; the worship gives the ferret a power ...”

“... truthfulness (Israel Shahak, Chairman of the Israeli League of Human Rights), socialism, P.G. Wodehouse. The present collection, culled from a decade’s writing in America, is principally useful as a map of how far and deep the American Empire has reached into the minds of the country’s writers, intellectuals and politicians. His main thesis is that ...”

“... steady enjoyment of almost everything that has happened to him along the way. In the age of P.G. Wodehouse there used to be an adjuration, typically shouted from a touchline of schoolboys: ‘Buck up there, Smith.’ Professor Quine has been enormously, almost monstrously bucked up, according to his own account. He strides through this century of war and ...”

“... I think it was P.G. Wodehouse who observed that the English strike Americans as funny when they are just being English. Similarly, philosophers strike the laity as funny when they are just being philosophers, and that makes it hard to be as funny about them as they are when they’re left to their own devices. But Michael Frayn is among the honoured few who have succeeded ...”

“... eye. There is Hiram Winterbotham ‘who sounds like an American millionaire in a novel by P.G. Wodehouse’ but is in fact a ‘bachelor with intellectual tastes’, wearing ‘enormous, totally non-conducting tortoise-shell glasses’ and accompanied by ‘a friend, inevitably called Michael, who said not a single word and contented himself with ...”

“... work. They have a galumphing comic quality, as of a Brian Rix farce turned into a story, and P.G. Wodehouse could have reshaped them. At best, they show Dostoevsky as the greatest playwright that Russia never had, for in them he sharpens his gift for causing the character and intrigue of a novel to develop exclusively through dialogue, building tension to ...”

“... who was sent down from Magdalen, wrote that ‘life was luncheons, luncheons all the way’. P.G. Wodehouse naturally decided that Bertie Wooster had been to Magdalen. In the late 19th century Magdalen began to have a few international scholars of note, but real change came only in the 1920s and 1930s, when a phalanx of powerful intellectuals demanded higher ...”

“... was under-celebrated when it was published last year: its remarkable handling of style.* For a 700-page book that was written in a hurry, A Journey’s register is very carefully judged. (Even the grammatical errors are impressively consistent: ‘The weeping and gnashing of teeth is pointless’; ‘The manifesto and the mandate was one for New ...”