Peter Washington

The Man and The Mask

Wodehouse: A Life

By

Viking 530pp £20 order from our bookshop

ANYONE WHO SAW Carol Thatcher’s television interview with her father last year must have been impressed by the shrewdness Denis concealed under a bufferish exterior. His friend Bill Deedes has even suggested that he welcomed his portrayal as a silly ass in Private Eye because it distracted the press from probing his influence in Downing Street. Deedes’s suggestion came to mind while I was reading this new biography of P G Wodehouse.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    • Hi , we would love to review 'Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar' in our next issue! Please could you get in… ,
    Follow Us