WODEHOUSIANA

Noticing the resemblance some Wodehousean characters bore to each other, a critic once ventured to comment that most of Plum's characters are the same people disguised under different names in different novels. Rather indiscreetly, I should add.

How do you think the irrepressible humorist would have reacted?

This was his response: "A certain critic - for, such men, I regret to say, do exist -- made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”

That was typical of Wodehouse: comical and light-hearted humour, sparkling wit and humourous levity most of his books are suffused with.

His novels frequently featured the dandified and somewhat woolly-headed Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet Jeeves who could be banked upon for sound advice, as well as an enormous pig named the Empress of Blandings. His comic prose was carefully styled with puns, similes and metaphors. They were eloquent novels with literary allusions and epic laugh-out-loud moments.

Here are some of his quotes from his books which will leave you chuckling.

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

To find a man's true character, play golf with him.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say “When!”

I always advise people never to give advice.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.

And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.

I always advise people never to give advice.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

The least thing upset him on the (golf) links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

Golf, like measles, should be caught young.

Has anybody ever seen a drama critic in the daytime? Of course not. They come out after dark, up to no good.

Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character.

He felt like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him in the leg.

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

She had a penetrating sort of laugh. Rather like a train going into a tunnel.

Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

The trouble with cats is that they've got no tact.

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.