skopia
Morgan Leafy, a British diplomat in a fictional West African state, must bribe an incorruptible Scottish doctor, conceal a venereal infection, and remove the maid lightning killed before the Duchess arrives.
Lorelei Lee, a blonde from Arkansas, keeps a diary about the men who buy her diamonds and gives away far more than she knows. Edith Wharton called it the great American novel.
Charles Pooter, a London clerk of vast unearned dignity, records every slight from tradesmen and every dinner-party triumph. He paints his bath red with enamel and mistakes the dissolving water for blood.
Three Victorians and a fox terrier row up the Thames, and Jerome turns the holiday into English comedy: a tin of pineapple nobody can open, a Hampton Court maze that traps everyone.
Bertie Wooster's friend Bingo Little falls in love in chapter after chapter, and Bertie's cousins run a betting book on which country vicar preaches longest. Jeeves repairs the damage in a sentence.
Uncle Matthew hunts his children across the Oxfordshire fields with bloodhounds. Linda Radlett escapes that house into two bad marriages and a French duke, in the funniest English novel of the interwar aristocracy.
Barnes sends a retired English doctor after the stuffed parrot once on Flaubert's desk. The search becomes chronologies, a bestiary, a mock exam, and under all of it the doctor's dead wife.
Plague empties London, a master flees, and his butler turns the house into a con shop, selling the philosopher's stone to every greedy fool who knocks. Jonson built the swindle like clockwork.
Jim Dixon loathes lecturing in medieval history, his professor's madrigal weekends, and the colleague trapping him with fake suicide threats. His drunken Merrie England lecture is the great set piece of English comedy.
Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass and Arthur Dent escapes in his bathrobe. It sold 250,000 copies in three months and put 42 into everyday speech.
Bertie Wooster is ordered to steal a silver cow-shaped cream jug, and, armed by Jeeves with one humiliating fact, tells an aspiring English dictator he is a frightful ass in black shorts.
John Self drinks and spends himself toward ruin between London and New York while his first film falls apart. Amis gave the decade's greed a voice English comic fiction spent years imitating.
Two minor courtiers from Hamlet wait in the wings of a play they cannot follow, flipping a coin that lands heads ninety two times running. Stoppard wrings comedy and dread from their helplessness.
Ignatius J. Reilly, obese and certain the modern age is beneath him, is pushed out of his mother's New Orleans house to find work. Toole wrote the funniest American novel of its century.
Mack and his friends, unemployed and unhurried, decide to repay Doc the marine biologist with a party. Steinbeck writes a Monterey street of bums and grocers and whores as a functioning society.
Plautus stole Greek plots and made them Roman, vulgar and fast. Shakespeare lifted his mistaken twins for The Comedy of Errors, Moliere lifted his miser, and farce has run on that machinery since.
Alceste cannot tell a lie and is destroying himself over a woman who lives on flattery. Tartuffe, the fake holy man eating his host's house, is hypocrisy caught whole and played for laughs.
Don Juan seduces, dodges his creditors, and believes in nothing, while his servant argues feebly for God and a stone statue accepts an invitation to dinner. Moliere never wrote anything more dangerous.
Twenty years into a war they never voted for, the women of Greece refuse their husbands until the men make peace. Aristophanes also hoists Socrates over the stage in a basket.
Sent to Paris to pry a young American away from a Frenchwoman, a middle-aged emissary looks around and tells a young painter to live all he can. James called it his best novel.