THANK YOU, WODEHOUSE

Two Oxford dons (the secondary contributor is A. D. Macintyre) offer pseudo-academic studies of Wodehouse trivia--but their tongue-in-cheek aprpoach is so dry as to be virtually invisible. There are footnoted, pedantic discussions or debates regarding: Bertie Wooster's age; the moral character of minor character Tom Travers; Bertie at Oxford (which college and what did he study?); the possible location of the country house Deverill Hall; whether the Wodehouse golfing stories are set in the US or England; and the precise chronology of the Blandings Castle stories, with ""Pre-porcine"" and ""Porcine"" periods (one of the few real chuckles here). There are lists of: Bertie's relatives, Bertie's fiances, etc. And there's a Threepwood family tree, along with a reconstructed railway timetable for trains to and from Market Blandings. So, as Frances Donaldson's introduction notes, this is pretty much a ""private joke""--only for those Wodehouse fanatics who are also familiar with (and tremendously amused by) the most scholarly styles of dusty, fact-sifting academia.