‘To criticise P. G. Wodehouse is like taking a spade to a soufflé,’ someone once wrote in Punch, and the equivalent eggy dish these days would probably be Craig Brown. Prolific and prodigiously inventive, he is the comic writer the rest of us admire from afar, and envy beyond the bounds of reason. How does he do it? At the moment, I believe, his productivity may have slipped a little from its 1990s apogee, but he is still delivering three ‘Way of the Worlds’ each week for the Telegraph, a celebrity diary each fortnight for Private Eye and a long and substantial book review every weekend for The Mail on Sunday. And let’s not forget the occasional book of his own, such as last year’s 1966 and All That, and radio versions of his writings that need to be overseen.

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