Wodehouse Tweets

Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.

If she ever turned into a werewolf, it would be one of those jolly breezy werewolves whom it is a pleasure to know.

Two telegrams, passing through it in the course of the next twelve hours, caused some gossip at the post office of the little town of Market Blandings. The first ran: McAllister, 11, Buxton Crescent, Cromwell Road, London. Return Immediately. — Emsworth. The second: Lord Emsworth, Blandings Castle, Shropshire. I will not. — McAllister.

'The modern young man,' said Aunt Dahlia, 'is a congenital idiot and wants a nurse to lead him by the hand and some strong attendant to kick him regularly at intervals of a quarter of an hour.'

One of his eyebrows had risen about an eighth of an inch, and I know he was deeply stirred, because I had rarely seen him raise an eyebrow more than a sixteenth of an inch.

Even at normal times Aunt Dahlia's map tended a little towards the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

I gave it up. The man annoyed me. I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie, but I was dashed if I could see why he couldn't do it with a bright and cheerful smile.

He was a long, slender youth, with green eyes, jet-black hair, and a passionate fondness for the sound of his own voice.

He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow.

"How are you, how are you, how are you?" I said, overcoming a slight desire to leap backwards out of the window.

Which Wodehouse book would you recommend to someone reading Plum for the very first time?

Bream Mortimer was tall and thin. He had small bright eyes and a sharply curving nose. He looked much more like a parrot than most parrots do. It gave strangers a momentary shock of surprise when they saw Bream Mortimer in restaurants, eating roast beef. They had the feeling that he would have preferred sunflower seeds.

He was a long, thin old gentleman in his middle seventies with a faraway unseeing look in his eye, not unlike that which a dead halibut on a fishmonger’s slab gives the pedestrian as he passes.

She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest-room.

“You know, Jeeves, you’re by way of being rather a topper.” “I endeavour to give satisfaction, sir.” “One in a million, by Jove!” “It is very kind of you to say so, sir.” “Well, that’s about all, then, I think.” “Very good, sir.”

A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled this man by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

There was a sound in the background like a distant sheep coughing gently on a mountainside. Jeeves sailing into action.