One morning, an agency sends over a potential new valet to the dim English gentleman Bertie Wooster after a late night with the lads. Ever resourceful, Jeeves whips up a conncoction to help his head.

“For a moment I felt as if somebody had touched off a bomb inside the old bean and was strolling down my throat with a lighted torch, and then everything seemed suddenly to get all right. The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the tree-tops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.”

Wooster hires Jeeves on the spot and thus begins P.G. Wodehouse’s many stories on the antics of Bertie and how Jeeves saves the day. I’ve enjoyed these appealing stories, full of British humor and wit, for years. I even named my tabby cat Jeeves because I thought it was the closest I’d ever come to having a butler. Wodehouse’s top-notch writing quality shines through in these amusing stories, though as Wodehouse suggests himself not everyone thinks so.

“I go in for what is known in the trade as ‘light writing’ and those who do that – humorists they are sometimes called – are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at.”