Young Men In Spats (Everyman's Library P G WODEHOUSE) - Hardcover

Wodehouse is at his most sparkling in this collection of stories concering members of the Drones Club. Pongo Twistleton and Freddie Widgeon may be small of brain and short of cash but they are always good for ingenious adventures, especially when it comes to falling in love with the wrong girl or cooking up hopeless schemes to make money. They and their contemporaries populate a series of vignettes in which the plot-twists keep you on your toes while the jokes keep on coming.

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (always known as ‘Plum’) wrote about seventy novels and some three hundred short stories over seventy-three years. He is widely recognised as the greatest 20th-century writer of humour in the English language.

Perhaps best known for the escapades of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, Wodehouse also created the world of Blandings Castle, home to Lord Emsworth and his cherished pig, the Empress of Blandings. His stories include gems concerning the irrepressible and disreputable Ukridge; Psmith, the elegant socialist; the ever-so-slightly-unscrupulous Fifth Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred; and those related by Mr Mulliner, the charming raconteur of The Angler’s Rest, and the Oldest Member at the Golf Club.

In 1936 he was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for ‘having made an outstanding and lasting contribution to the happiness of the world’. He was made a Doctor of Letters by Oxford University in 1939 and in 1975, aged ninety-three, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He died shortly afterwards, on St Valentine’s Day.