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So wrote P. G. Wodehouse to Guy Bolton in 1952 as they planned a joint book of reminiscences of the theatrical world of the 1920s. “I think we shall have to let truth go to the wall if it interferes with entertainment. And we must sternly suppress any story that hasn’t a snapper at the finish. . . . Even if we have to invent every line of the thing, we must have entertainment.” Their book, Bring on the Girls: The Improbable Story of Our Life in Musical Comedy, With Pictures to Prove It, is a sprightly account of the birth of the modern musical by two men at its center. Some of the stories are somewhat exaggerated, which is a great worry to Wodehouse’s biographers. The concern is more than a bit overblown, for Wodehouse and Bol ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 February 2013, on page 17 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/-WE-MUST-BE-FUNNY--7545
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The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
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