Intellectuals, and journalists looking for worms in the apple, find it hard to forgive Wodehouse for being so apparently sunny and straightforward. Surely there must be some dark secret somewhere? Reviews of his letters have contained such phrases as "something withheld" —"wears too fixed a smile" —"self-suppression everywhere." These seem to be symptoms of reviewers terror, a well-known complaint like athlete's foot, which hamstrings the reviewer s normal responses through the fear that he must have missed some quite obvious point all his colleagues will have picked up. It must be said that Wodehouse s books might be much more interesting if there were things lurking in the background —instead of the pulse beating its happy rhythm on and on, unconscious of history and society and change and all the rest of it. Or rather not unconscious.

Frances Donaldson has done a superb job of editing and writing an informative and perceptive introduction. She arranges the letters under the heading of subject and recipient, which gives a much better and clearer impression than the usual chronological hodge-podge, and it is a method that might be commended to all compilers of literary correspondence.