‘The performing flea of the literary world’, was an epithet accorded with some contempt and assumed by wodehouse with substantial glee. A strangely appropriate choice of words, for like the performing flea, wodehouse’s works never held many surprises for his devotees. Formulaic to the last , the story of boy meets girl and sordid aunts set in Edwardian England never lost its charm. But the astonishing output blinds us to the beautiful prose, intersperse with elaborate misquotations and intricate wordplay, the hallmarks of a master wordsmith. It’s been my aim to have the complete works of Wodehouse before I die, a fanciful goal you might say, still it gives me an incentive to resist the temptation to fall on the nearest uncovered spike the next time I’m dragged by my mother on one of her shopping jaunts.