Rereading books one has enjoyed can be enormous fun. Sadly, due to some sort of residual streak of puritanism, a feeling that one should be getting on with new things, this is not a pleasure I often allow myself.

Fortunately, various factors last week permitted a change of perspective: first, the need to read again a novel by Galsworthy, which turned out most illuminating; second a bad attack of flu, convalescence from which required activity that was not too demanding; finally the decision to bring out a book based on these essays, which endowed preparation for them with the sanctity of productive work. With less to occupy myself with currently than at any time over the last few years, rereading Wodehouse and suchlike seemed then positively a virtue.

Wodehouse, I must admit, was not someone who commanded my devotion, and I had found the Jeeves books, his most famous, repetitive and not especially memorable. Jeeves is the endlessly resourceful manservant of Bertie Wooster, the narrator and principal character of fourteen Wodehouse books. Bertie is a classic upper class twit, with no ambitions and little intellect, but full of loyalty to his friends, chivalry towards ladies, and a healthy appetite for good food and much drink. He first appeared in 1923, and hardly changed in the fifty years that culminated in his last appearance in Aunts aren't Gentlemen.