Actually rather good... If Jackie Collins had grown up on the Shameless estate, this is pretty much what we think she'd come up with... compulsive.

Top Class

No facile answers are provided here. Hester is, after all, guilty; Pearl the "Elfin" child, has devilish traits; the Puritans are given their due. Chillingworth and Dimmesdale are villains because of their hypocrisy but remain sympathetic because they are both self-destructive...

A defiant adulteress; a community of hypocrites who force her to wear a scarlet letter A around her neck as a badge of her shame; an evil husband, secretly stoking the fires of their moral fervour until it reaches boiling point; and, finally, a stunning public confession in which the woman reveals the identity of her lover, who is then promptly sent to the gallows

In making fiction out of the excesses of his Puritan ancestors, Hawthorne anticipated the technique of a modern movie-director. He was a master of crowd scenes

[Nathaniel Hawthorne] recaptured, for his New England, the essence of Greek tragedy

A genius ... Elusive, delicate but lasting

P.G. Wodehouse is the gold standard of English wit

To dive into a Wodehouse novel is to swim in some of the most elegantly turned phrases in the English language

Wodehouse is so utterly, properly, simply funny

I've recorded all the Jeeves books, and I can tell you this: it's like singing Mozart. The perfection of the phrasing is a physical pleasure. I doubt if any writer in the English language has more perfect music

Wodehouse was quite simply the Bee's Knees. And then some

I constantly find myself drooling with admiration at the sublime way Wodehouse plays with the English language

Quite simply, the master of comic writing at work

To pick up a Wodehouse novel is to find oneself in the presence of genius - no writer has ever given me so much pure enjoyment

Compulsory reading for anyone who has a pig, an aunt - or a sense of humour!

The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

The greatest comic writer ever

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

Sublime comic genius

He exhausts superlatives

The Everyman edition promises to be a splendid celebration of the divine Plum

The handsome bindings are only the cherry on top of what is already a cake without compare

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour