Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves novels are surely the most delightful, amusing, innocent, and refreshing fiction ever written in graceful, wry English.
Christopher Buckley reviews Wodehouse's life and writing: Yours Ever, Plum: The Letters and Life of P.G. Wodehouse. For a man who sought little but serenity, the presence of his wife and his dogs, and books, he had an eventful life.
From one of his letters:
“I sometimes feel,” Wodehouse wrote Townend in 1933, “as if I were a case of infantilism. I seem mentally so exactly as I was then [at school]. All my ideas and ideals are the same. I still think the Bedford [cricket] match is the most important thing in the world.”
A few random quotes from the books:
As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle ('Please read this carefully and send it on Jane') the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor - and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.
It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.
I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.
Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.
I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.
Anybody can talk me round. If I were in a Trappist monastery, the first thing that would happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language.
