Category: PG Wodehouse

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.

Percy Jeeves

In the middle of July I went on a day trip to Cheltenham to watch Gloucester play Essex. As I am not especially fond of cricket (I was a Wet Bob) there was another reason.

Our Dumb Chums

I have been reflecting on the largish number of PG Wodehouse stories that feature animals and birds. Cats, dogs, pigs, parrots, canaries fairly throng the pages and I wondered if this might be an angle worth exploring.

Cocktail Time

Frederick, 5th Earl of Ickenham, is my favourite PG Wodehouse character and if you have the misfortune not to be acquainted with him where better to be introduced than by reading Cocktail Time, published in 1958. Then you can call him Uncle Fred.

Comfort Reading

In the autumn of 1972 I was invited to stay with Baron and Baroness von V-S on their estate in Germany. A Mercedes was at the station to meet me driven by a tweedy type who spoke no English. It dawned on me that this was not the Baron but his chauffeur. A parp on… Continue reading Comfort Reading