The Drones Club is temporarily closed for summer, so Bertie Wooster is forced to find other sociable dwellings. The new chairman of his bank is the mean killjoy Sir Gilbert Skinner, replacing his dear friend Buffty (a man ‘four parts chalk-stripe, three parts whiskers, and two parts gin’). Elsewhere, his lofty Aunt Dahlia, a woman who launches herself ‘across the hotel lobby like a galleon’s figurehead, leaving in her wake the jetsam of other, more timorous guests’, is about to disturb everyone’s stomachs with her own caustic version of Worcestershire sauce.

For all the ‘storm clouds’ looming over Europe, Ben Schott keeps the tribulations suitably light in this newly penned homage to P G Wodehouse, Jeeves and the King of Clubs. Reviewers of the previous estate-approved Jeeves novel, by Sebastian Faulks, pointed out that the mentions of death in Faulks’s story