Paperback: P G Wodehouse: A Life in Letters (Arrow, £9.99)

 
William Leith22 August 2013

We associate P G Wodehouse, who was born in 1881, with a sort of English idyll of Edwardian country houses, gentlemen’s clubs, and cricket pitches. The stories, though timeless, exist in the innocent, decent — and wholly imagined — England that existed before the two world wars. Reading Wodehouse’s letters, which make a chunky, satisfying volume, we see a life of increasing stress as the idyll becomes, for its author, further and further out of reach. Here, we get the inside story of the big scandal of his life. Captured by the Nazis in 1940, he was the victim of propaganda from both sides. Later, he went to America and never came back. Moving and sad.

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