Almost 50 years ago, in the New Year Honours list of January 1975, P. G. Wodehouse was awarded a knighthood. This was only a month before his death. Thirty years previously, at the end of the Second World War, this would have seemed — to put it mildly — very unlikely.
This was not due to any lack of respect or admiration for Wodehouse’s literary accomplishments. On the contrary, by the 1940s he had established a considerable international reputation not only as a consummate craftsman of comic prose, but also as an acclaimed lyricist. What damaged his reputation, at that time, was his unwise — if innocent — agreement to make radio broadcasts from what was then occupied France, where he had been interned following the German invasion.
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