Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:
Douglas Adams called him “the greatest comic writer ever.” Hilaire Belloc went so far as to pronounce him “the best living writer of English,” and rather than retract that excessive praise he explained it. P.G. Wodehouse had perfectly accomplished what he set out to do: create and sustain a world that would amuse us.
What really tore it for me, though—after managing to avoid reading Wodehouse for half a century—was learning that the fiercely witty Christopher Hitchens held him in the highest esteem. Incidentally, both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie thought Wodehouse, that silly, fluffy, whimsical writer, had written the consummate anti-Nazi diatribe:
The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting, ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’
Dated, you say? Edwardian prose that no longer holds up? Neil Gaiman would disagree. David Foster Wallace called Wodehouse “timelessly funny.” For Stephen Fry, “he exhausts superlatives.” John le Carré insisted that no library “is complete without its well-thumbed copy of Right Ho, Jeeves.”
More here.