Some two or three years ago I was asked in the United States to broadcast a few words on my own trade of writing—what I thought of it and why I disliked it. (p. 342)

Now in the course of this broadcast I gave as the best writer of English now alive, Mr. P. G. Wodehouse.

It was not only a very sincere but a reasonable and well thought out pronouncement. Yet I got a vast number of communications asking me what I exactly meant. Not that those who had heard me doubted Mr. Wodehouse's genius…. No; their puzzlement was why I should call the author who was supreme in that particular line of country the "best" writer of our time: the best living writer of English: why I should have called him, as I did call him, "The head of my profession".

I cannot do better in...