This rather caustic take on the wealthy, with their illusions and pretensions, could be updated to 2023 without much effort. The chapters are all loosely connected by stories about a continuing group of characters, so it's not a novel, but more like a collection of short humour pieces. The men gathe

Arcadian Adventures is entertaining, but as a critique feels quaint and without consequence. I cant help but feel Leacock insulates the subjects of his satire from the world around them, leading to a book that can poke fun without injuring.

The sequel as may be to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and for my money the best Leacock I've ever read. Which is saying something; he's second only to Wodehouse in my pantheon of twentieth-century humorists; but if anthologies are anything to go by he was best known for the parodic short storie

Published in 1914; Fresh and Pertinent Today

It's really very simple. Take the feel of P.G. Wodehouse. Add an ironic approach to business and finance that rivals A.P. Herbert's treament of the practice of law. Then add a bemused and generous, but razor sharp and always alert, sensibility that fondly

A couple months ago, I went to a talk on the accuracy of university admissions tests given by a visiting professor from Great Britain. The speaker concluded that, with globalization, these tests are becoming less and less accurate, which will lead to ruined lives. I asked whether this conclusion als

Stephen Leacock isn't tremendously well-known these days, or at least not in the UK, but I have a lot of his books, picked up from a second-hand shop in Eastbourne, all different colours and degrees of batteredness, and I love them. This one is about the excesses of the wealthy elites in the 1910's