A baker’s dozen of P.G. Wodehouse’s finest short stories. ‘What a very, very lucky person you are. Spread out before you are the finest and funniest words from the finest and funniest writer the past century ever knew.’ Stephen Fry Aunts, engagements, misunderstandings and hangover cures; this delightful collection from ‘the greatest chronicler of a certain kind of Englishness’ (Julian Fellowes) brings together a baker’s dozen of P. G. Wodehouse’s finest short stories. In this beautiful edition we find Bertie Wooster and Jeeves embarking on foolhardy quests and inspired rescue missions. We discover Ukridge, the ever-optimistic animated blob of mustard, undeterred in his big broad outlook, no matter how bleak things look, while the Fifth Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred, continues enjoying life, quite oblivious to the embarrassment he’s causing. And, as snow falls on the links outside the Angler's Rest, Mr Mulliner, the Oldest Member at the Golf Club, settles in to recount tales of romance and ghosts, and keep the tide of intellectual – albeit rather one-sided – conversation flowing. Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit ( Very Good, Jeeves) One Touch of Nature ( The Man With Two Left Feet) The Ordeal of Young Tuppy (Very Good, Jeeves) Ukridge’s Dog College ( Ukridge) The Story of William ( Meet Mr Mulliner) Uncle Fred Flits By ( Young Men in Spats) How’s That, Umpire ( Nothing Serious) Honeysuckle Cottage ( Meet Mr Mulliner) The Spot of Art ( Very Good, Jeeves) The Heel of Achilles ( The Clicking of Cuthbert) Indian Summer of an Uncle ( Very Good, Jeeves) Romance at Droitgate Spa ( Eggs, Beans and Crumpets) Sundered Hearts ( The Clicking of Cuthbert)
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).
