The first is that many of his cultural allusions, wholly familiar to the English middle classes, especially English public schoolboys, from the 19th century to the 1980s, are now forgotten. They need rescuing, or rather, for scholars have ploughed this furrow, re-rescuing.
Monday, January 01, 2024
Learned humor …
… P.G. Wodehouse’s literary canon. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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While serving in Yugoslavia as liaisons to the Partisans, Evelyn Waugh and Frederick Smith tried to get some peace from Randolph Churchill by betting him that he could not read the Bible straight through. He could not, and the peace may have been shorter than they hoped for. But while the attempt lasted, he would occasionally announce the discovery that this or that tag remembered from Wodehouse actually came from the Bible.
ReplyDelete(This may be covered in the linked article--but I am not going to register with The Spectator to read it.)