Above Average at Games: The Very Best of P.G. Wodehouse on Sport

As Wodehouse's biographer Frances Donaldson observed, it was vitally important to the boy Plum that he was `above average at games'. Luckily, he was known at school as `a noted athlete, a fine footballer and cricketer [and] a boxer', and sport inspired much of his earliest writings, as well as some of his very finest and laugh-out-loud funniest. Wodehouse wrote with trademark wit on a rich range of games - and on cricket and golf, in particular - as well as anyone ever has, bringing a knowledge and a passion born of practice. English cricket inspired in Wodehouse what he himself long considered to be his favourite work; and yet America (which he first visited keenly and then came to call home) led him to the love of baseball, and golf - enthusiasms that drew him to new tales for new audiences, including the celebrated golf stories which John Updike described as `the best fiction ever done about the sport.' This rollicking anthology, selected, edited and introduced by the novelist Richard T. Kelly, offers a vivid picture of Wodehouse at play - in the ring, at the crease, on the tee - which is guaranteed to please any sporting crowd. Beginning with early journalism, taking in extracts from novels and short stories in their entirety, it all adds up to a medal-winning collection.