When the meatier conversation at the party is over and you have drearily listened to the latest on Chiang Kaishek,… and the other topics which are regarded as conversation in these funereal days of repeal, how joyful it is to find that the host is not entirely a sadist, but is going to enliven the social seminar with a showing of clowns and magicians.

In the book world, the magicians are the authors of literate detective stories…. Yet greater are the clowns, and of these the greatest living is a man who at so early a period as his christening indicated the future by giving himself the completely Wodehousian name of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.

Plenty of fictioneers have written two or three funny stories; I doubt if any other has so gone on, year by year, producing funny books, so that Wodehouse has become not an author but...