SOURCE: “Joy Comes in the Morning and Stays for a Generation,” in The Spectator, Vol. 271, November 20, 1993, pp. 50-1.

In the following laudatory assessment of A Man of Means, Trevor praises the appealing nature of Wodehouse's fiction.

‘I go off the rails,’ P. G. Wodehouse once wrote, ‘unless I stay all the time in a sort of artificial world of my own creation. A real character in one of my books sticks out like a sore thumb.’

It's a world that goes back to the Boer War, when Wodehouse's school stories were just beginning to entertain English schoolboys. Since then his thwarted aunts and bewildered earls, his mean men of commerce and disagreeable children have entertained almost the whole world. They've become known to all classes and all kinds of people, readers and non-readers, intellectuals and non-intellectuals, upper crust and bottom drawer. His idiom has entered language after language...