Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse: 32 books

Quite without meaning it, I really won the Gentlemen v. Players match the summer I was eighteen. They don’t say anything about me in the reports, but all the time I was really the thingummy — the iron hand behind the velvet glove, or something. That’s not it, but it’s something of the sort. What...

The Thin End of the Wedge “I beg you,” said the Headless Man with some agitation, “not to dream of doing such a thing. Of course, if you think that I am unequal to the work——” he added rather stiffly. “My dear Sir,” I replied, “not at all. Not at all. What a notion! I am sure there...

My brother Bob sometimes says that if he dies young or gets white hair at the age of thirty it will be all my fault. He says that I was bad at fifteen, worse at sixteen, while “present day,” as they put it in the biographies of celebrities, I am simply awful. This is very ungrateful of him, because...

“What they want, of course,” said Clowes, “is exercise.” “They get out of that with their beastly doctor’s certificates,” said Trevor. “That’s the worst of this place. Any slacker who wants to shirk games goes to some rotten doctor in the holidays, swears he’s got a weak heart or...

A silence had fallen upon the smoking-room. The warrior just back from the front had enquired after GEORGE VANDERPOOP, and we, who knew that GEORGE’S gentle spirit had, to use a metaphor after his own heart, long since been withdrawn from circulation, were feeling uncomfortable and wondering how to break the news. SMITHSON is our specialist in tact, and we looked to him to be spokesman.

We had arrived at Marvis Bay, and were to play the last match of our tour on the following morning. Marvis Bay is in Devonshire. We always take it last on our fixture-list, so as to end happily, as it were. Sidmouth may rout us, and Seaton may make us hunt leather till the soles of our boots wear through;...

The invasion of America was complete. The navy, its morale completely sapped by grape-juice, had offered but slight resistance to the German Armada; and the army, too proud to fight, had stood around while the Japanese established their foothold on the soil of God’s Own Country. Once begun, it had...

It is a splendid thing to be seventeen and have one’s hair up and feel that one cannot be kissed indiscriminately anymore by sticky boys and horrid old gentlemen who “knew you when you were that high, my dear,” or who nursed you on their knees when you were a baby. When I came down to dinner for...

I suggested in 1914 that the square-shaped punctuation marks, which are a characteristic of the Manuscript, might have some bearing on the vexed question of its date. What I have since noticed has considerably strengthened my original surmise. For instance, in Plate X. (lines 2 and 7) will be seen examples...

I believe this story to be fictitious. It was told me by a man, a perfect stranger, whose eye gleamed with untruthfulness. He told it to me in the knowledge that I would be unable to take any steps towards verifying his statements, for I had already informed him that I was only resting in the village...

AFTER THE OTTER (By our Confirmed Grumbler) The visitor gives his cap a hitch to one side to indicate the sportsman, grasps his hazel walking-stick (white crooked handle and spike complete for eighteen-pence), and prepares to dash off in any direction in which the otter may show himself. There is a pause....

The discovery of a Gallo-Roman inscription, figured in the Revue Savoisienne of 15th November, 1867, and republished by M. Adolphe Pictet in the Revue Archéologique for July, 1868, forms the subject of one of those essays from the pen of the veteran philologist for which the students of Celtic languages...

Mrs. Bramble looked up, beaming with a kind of amiable fat-headedness. She was the stupidest woman in Barnes, and one of the best-tempered. A domestic creature, wrapped up in Bill, her husband, and Harold, her son. At the present moment only the latter was with her. He sat on the Other side of the table,...

It was a May morning in 1825—spring-time of the year, late spring-time of the century. It had rained the night before, and a warm pallor in the eastern sky was the only indication that the sun was trying to pierce the gray dome of nearly opaque watery fog, lying low upon that part of the world now...