One hundred years after his first novel was published P.G. Wodehouse still promises a release from everyday cares into a paradise of innocent comic mayhem. His many books are still in print, his characters -Jeeves, Wooster and Lord Emsworth – have passed into the language and his admirers range from Dorothy Parker, Evelyn Waugh to Salman Rushdie, Stephen Fry and Gerry Adams.In a new biography based on research throughout Britain, Europe and the USA Robert McCrum delves deep beneath the brilliant surface of P.G. Wodehouse’s extraordinary life: his youth in Edwardian Britain, his golden years in Jazz Age America and his internment in Nazi Germany, the experience that haunted him to his death in 1975, to create a moving and extremely funny portrait of an English writer of genius.