h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It is scandalous that Wodehouse was kept waiting till 1975, when he was well into his nineties, for a knighthood.

The British couldn't, apparently, forgive him for making light of his German experiences. The official story was that German Prisoner-of-War Camp must be unbearably grim, and your prison officers inhuman, let alone ungentlemanly. Wodehouse told it as it was, and paid the price of very ugly defamation at home.

Now if he'd been sent to Abu Ghraib, it would have been a different story.

The entire British aristocracy has Wodehouse to thank for the soft landing they had in the 20th Century. Communism and militant Labour feeling came dangerously close to boiling over and upsetting the social order several times. Wodehouse painted the oppressors of the masses as merely daft, pleasant, harmless upper-class twits (unlike himself: he can be identified with the dangerous rugger-playing type that occasionally looms as a threat to the wimpish hero in his stories) and the people smiled and adopted them as pets.