Laudator Temporis Acti

Excerpts from P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), Piccadilly Jim:

Chapter 8:

Well, he could go home. No, he couldn't. His pride revolted at that solution. Prodigal Son stuff was all very well in its way, but it lost its impressiveness if you turned up again at home two weeks after you had left. A decent interval among the husks and swine was essential.

Chapter 11:

'What's the matter, Jerry? You seem perturbed. You have the aspect of one whom Fate has smitten in the spiritual solar plexus, or of one who has been searching for the leak in Life's gaspipe with a lighted candle. What's wrong?'

Chapter 12:

To a man with his ingrained distaste for work in any shape the sight of those wage-slaves outside there in the outer office had, as he had told Mr Pett, been stimulating: but only because it filled him with a sort of spiritual uplift to think that he had not got to do that sort of thing. Consider them in the light of fellow-workers, and the spectacle ceased to stimulate and became nauseating.

Chapter 17:

'You —- ah — appear to dislike the rich,' said Mrs Pett, as nearly in her grand manner as she could contrive.

Miss Trimble bowled over the grand manner as if it had been a small fowl and she an automobile. She rolled over it and squashed it flat.

'Hate 'em! Sogelist!'

'I beg your pardon,' said Mrs Pett humbly. This woman was beginning to oppress her to an almost unbelievable extent.

'Sogelist! No use f'r idle rich. Ev' read B'nard Shaw? Huh? Or Upton Sinclair? Uh? Read'm. Make y'think a bit.'

Chapter 18:

For it was a defect in Jimmy's character — one of his many defects — that he loathed and scorned minor poetry and considered minor poets, especially when feminine, an unnecessary affliction....It was the sort of stuff which long-haired blighters read alone to other long-haired blighters in English suburban drawing-rooms. It was the sort of stuff that — to be brief — gave him the Willies.

Related post: The Popular View of Poetry and Poets.