Category: PG Wodehouse

A Forgotten Author

I don’t know how I know the story of The Monkey’s Paw. Perhaps it was done as a play at Castle Park or read to us there? It is a short story published in 1902 and subsequently adapted for stage, screen and the wireless. The genre, if you don’t know it, is spooky, chiller,thriller.

Dry January?

I went to lunch and ordered a Panang (sic) Curry. It was, no doubt about it, road-kill. I didn’t need to be a mortician to recognise those little squirrel bones – well maybe it was something else …

A Place in the Country

People often talk of having “a place in the country” a splendidly non-specific expression that means anything from a castle set in 10,000 acres that has been in the family since the reign of Elizabeth I to a rented potting shed. My place in the country in the 1990s was the latter.

Fingers on the Button

If you live in a democracy it’s a good plan to have the casting vote (just in case). Votes cast for watching University Challenge at home are exactly 50% in favour but I don’t have that casting vote, so it’s a treat to be on my own for a few days and to indulge.

Letters

It’s interesting to reflect on how you first came to read an author. Can you remember your first PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, etc?

Norman Murphy – Part One

Every two years the PG Wodehouse Society holds a dinner to celebrate his birthday. Demand for places outstrips supply so I often don’t go, to give other members a look-in. This week I  did attend but the evening was over-shadowed with sadness.

Highgate Revisited

This is where I lived in August 1976. I had a job but nowhere to live. Fortunately a university friend was away on holiday and I borrowed his flat for my first month in London. I was reminded of this when I walked down Dartmouth Park Hill this week; a Brideshead Revisited moment.

Max Beerbohm

So many posts start like this, but here I go again – more than forty years ago … I was given as a birthday present a novel, actually the only one he wrote, by Max Beerbohm. The donor was a university friend, we are still friends and I still have Zuleika Dobson.

In Three Words

Charles Moore writing in The Spectator last week drew my attention to an 80th anniversary that had passed me by.