Somewhat as if Robinson Crusoe tried to tell Man Friday about Yorkshire pudding, it’s hard to explain Wodehouse to the uninitiated. He evolved a comedy of manners and a mannered style that came into perfect fluency and equilibrium by the early Thirties. In the early Fifties that tautness of control began to slacken. I myself believe that he reached the summit of his careful art with The Code of the Woosters, published in 1938, and Joy in the Morning, largely written as the Germans were preparing to invade France, polished as they bore Wodehouse off from Le Touquet to internment in Germany, and published after the war. His latest biographer, Frances Donaldson, believes the peak came earlier, with Thank You, Jeeves, in 1934. Wodehouse himself preferred Quick Service, published in 1940.

It is not a dispute of much importance. By the mid-Thirties Hilaire Belloc was broadcasting to America his view that Wodehouse was “the best living writer of English” and there are at least half a dozen books in the decade surrounding that dictum to which admirers can reach, if asked to furnish proofs of Belloc’s veracity.