Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets by P.G. Wodehouse

Here the building may be the same, but the members are more of the age and disposition you would hope and expect. At any rate, his 1987 cover for the Uncle Fred novel Cocktail Time (1958) makes ample amends: I suspect this matter may have been discussed with Ionicus, or he may have reached the same conclusion independently. The Drones, as everyone knows, are a lighthearted bunch, but not here. There is not one of them that I would trust to chuck bread at each other at mealtimes not with accuracy, anyway. The only issue I would now take with Ionicus is that the Drones on display are in general far too elderly and respectable. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).There is an amazing wealth of detail in the cover here, from the crusty buffers in the foreground, through the exuberant figure of Bingo Little bursting in with an almost audible 'Vo-de-o-de-o' in the middle distance (the waiter and the page boy equally startled by the apparition) and the corners of respectable old portraits appearing at the edges (when was the Drones Club founded, for heaven's sake?), and to the beautifully detailed perspective through the double doors and the corridor to the arched window at the end.

He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. Sean O'Casey famously called him 'English literature's performing flea', a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.īest known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.Īn acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death.

Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets by P.G. Wodehouse