He had created a world that was complete, self-sufficient and almost faultless

The man and his work were one. Evelyn Waugh later described Wodehouse’s work as timeless, but it is also immutable. The comparative lack of development in his writing is one of its unique features: no other twentieth-century English writer of consequence evolved in his mature work as little as Wodehouse. He had created a world that was complete, self-sufficient and almost faultless.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 371

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him. In addition to his upbringing, there was his temperamental preference for finding the easiest way out of a tricky situation – and his obsessive commitment to his writing. It is these two factors that colour his actions with the taint of irresponsibility. Combined with his failure to understand the nature of Nazism, they proved fatal to his reputation.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 305

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots

Wodehouse was not alone in flirting with the studios. The talkies had triggered a new gold rush, anticipated by Herman Mankiewicz when in 1925, after a visit to the West Coast, he had cabled his friend Ben Hecht, saying: ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.’ Post-war Hollywood was challenging New York, where the first big studios had been based. The movie-makers’ desperate need for Broadway talent, people who could supply dialogue and scenarios, inspired a westward stampede of playwrights and short story writers. The exodus from the East was, Wodehouse wrote later, ‘like one of those great race movements of the middle ages’.

R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004), 184