‘Cheaper and more effective than Valium’.1 Offers ‘relief from anxiety, raginess or an afternoon-long tendency towards the sour’.2 ‘Read when you’re well and when you’re poorly; when you’re travelling, and when you’re not; when you’re feeling clever, and when you’re feeling utterly dim.’3 Whatever your mood, P. G. Wodehouse, widely acknowledged to be ‘the best English comic novelist of the century’4, is guaranteed to lift your spirits. Why? Because ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’5 How? ‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’6 1 Olivia Williams 2 Caitlin Moran 3 Lynne Truss 4 Sebastian Faulks 5 Evelyn Waugh 6 Stephen Fry Ever on the lookout for a quick buck, a solid gold fortune, or at least a plausible little scrounge, the irrepressible Ukridge gives con men a bad name. Looking like an animated blob of mustard in his bright yellow raincoat, he invests time, passion and energy (but seldom actual cash) in a series of increasingly bizarre money-making schemes. Shares in an accident syndicate? Easily arranged. Finance for a dog college? It's yours. And if you throw in some cats, flying unexpectedly from windows, and a young man trying ever-more-desperately to impress the family of his latest love, you get a medley of Wodehouse delights in which lunacy and comic exuberance reign supreme.
- Goodbye to All Cats
- Ukridge's Dog College
- Ukridge's Accident Syndicate
Author
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
