Weekend Wodehouse

Description

'You don't analyse such sunlit perfection- you just bask in its warmth and splendour' Stephen Fry WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HILAIRE BELLOC In the course of a career that encompassed nearly one hundred novels and short story collections (written over more than seventy years), P.G. Wodehouse established himself as not only a fond satirist of the foppish upper class, but one of the greatest comic voices in all literature. Including stories featuring all his finest creations, including Jeeves, Lord Emsworth of Blandings, Ukridge and the disreputable members of the Drones club, this collection is an ideal introduction to the writer described by Douglas Adams as 'the greatest comic writer ever'.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (always known as 'Plum') wrote more than ninety novels and some three hundred short stories over 73 years. He is widely recognised as the greatest 20th-century writer of humour in the English language. Perhaps best known for the escapades of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, Wodehouse also created the world of Blandings Castle, home to Lord Emsworth and his cherished pig, the Empress of Blandings. His stories include gems concerning the irrepressible and disreputable Ukridge; Psmith, the elegant socialist; the ever-so-slightly-unscrupulous Fifth Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred; and those related by Mr Mulliner, the charming raconteur of The Angler's Rest, and the Oldest Member at the Golf Club. In 1936 he was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for 'having made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world'. He was made a Doctor of Letters by Oxford University in 1939 and in 1975, aged 93, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He died shortly afterwards, on St Valentine's Day.

Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in -- Evelyn Waugh P.G. Wodehouse remains the greatest chronicler of a certain kind of Englishness, that no one else has ever captured quite so sharply, or with quite as much wit and affection -- Julian Fellowes He is the head of my profession... If in, say, fifty years, Jeeves and any other of that great company shall have faded, then what we have so long called England will no longer be -- Hilaire Belloc A peerless collection -- Max Hastings * Sunday Times * A genius ... Elusive, delicate but lasting -- Alan Ayckbourn