Deciding to write about P. G. Wodehouse in this series opened up the floodgates in a manner I find immensely pleasurable. Discussing someone whose main contribution, indeed his only one if we accept David Cecil's characterization, was humour suggests a more extensive, or perhaps liberal, interpretation of the parameters of this series. It seemed obvious then that I should also write about the man who, at least according to his Wikipedia entry, wrote more words that have been published than any other writer ever.

I had to have recourse to Wikipedia because, once again, after many years of not reading the man's work, I felt that memory required to be supplemented by research. This was a good thing, because the man I wanted to talk about turned out to be called Charles Hamilton. I had known him as Frank Richards, writer of the Billy Bunter series, and thought that his actual name, rather foolishly, for I knew he was also Hilda Richards, author of books about Billy's sister Bessie.

In fact, he wrote under various names some other series of books about schoolboys too, when this was a well established and popular genre. These books dealt with public schools, what seems a strange British locution for private schools, where boys were sent to become gentlemen, and potential rulers of other breeds, as Kipling termed them, in the Empire.