A writer like Wodehouse who published over a hundred books cannot have been a Flaubert or a James Joyce, but in his own style and idiom he was a connoisseur of the mot juste, as careful to get the precise nuance of every Bertie Wooster slang phrase—so artfully contrasted with the stately idiom of Jeeves—as Joyce was to catch the precise accent of the various inhabitants of Dublin on that June day in 1904. Wodehouse in translation, like Dickens in translation, must lose some of his appeal. Bertie, Jeeves, Ukridge, Mr. Mulliner and the Oldest Member belong to the English-speaking world as much as Sam Weller and Huckleberry Finn.

[The quotation which illustrates] Wodehouse's political innocence also illustrates (as it was meant to do) his superb command of the English language for his immediate humorous purposes. It is the opening of a story … collected in Lord Emsworth...