Category: PG Wodehouse

When I Was Five

“A house in Kensington and £2,000 a year.” Sounds a bit like some thing from the pen of Muriel Spark, doesn’t it? Well, you’d have to sell the house these days. When I started in the City I never aspired to a residence in Kensington but I thought that I could jog along on £4,000… Continue reading When I Was Five

Phoney

Kingsley Amis kicked it off with Colonel Sun in 1968. “It” is the craze for continuation novels and authors such as Agatha Christie, P G Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle have all been victims of this literary mugging.

The Man Who….

This post is about someone who wrote more than 170 novels, 18 plays and 917 short stories. In 1928 a quarter of all books sold in the UK were by this author. One more clue: this person wrote the screenplay for King Kong.

Leather Armchairs

Leather Armchairs is a book by Charles Graves, the poet Robert’s brother, published in 1963. It has a foreword by P G Wodehouse, which is a good start, and it describes sixty of the London Clubs then extant.

Croquet Special

Today dawns in East Anglia with expectation, even excitement, hanging in the air. My illustration is an inadequate attempt to capture the mood. It is the occasion of the annual Late Summer Luncheon for members of the Norfolk County Lawn Croquet Society.

Serious Money

An American reader puts down his copy of The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham and, after taking  a sip or two from a glass of Riesling, writes to remind me

All About You and Heaven

Last week veteran BBC cricket commentator, Jonathan Agnew, was reprimanded for not wearing a tie when making a broadcast from the pavilion at Lord’s. This prompted Times journalist and P G Wodehouse Society member, Patrick Kidd, to recall a Wodehouse short story in which Lord Plumpton thinks he is being stung by wasps. His companion… Continue reading All About You and Heaven

Kentucky Calling

I lived in a large house, well really a castle, in Ireland as a child. It had one telephone placed under the stairs, made of Bakelite, with a circular label like a now defunct tax disc that read DUNLEER 5. This was useful if you forgot your number.

Wake Up, Sir!

I bought “Wake Up, Sir”, by Jonathan Ames, lured by “hilarious” being quoted five times across the top of the cover and this quote from The New York Times Book Review; “A Wodehouse novel for the recovery era”. What could possibly go wrong?