This subtle, beautifully constructed study of an attractive, intelligent, spirited young woman's transition from insouciance to enlightenment is a classic. Passion, intrigue, betrayal - it sounds like a potboiler, but James's observations of Victorian manners, understanding of human nature and exquisite prose elevate it to another league

The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world

Subtle and sophisticated and concerned with psychological nuance and social acceptability

James is the master of making what is not said the most important thing on the page

I read Portrait of a Lady by Henry James maybe once a year. I just love the story. I love the pace of it

James's formidable powers of observation, his stance as a kind of bachelor recorder of human doings in which he is not involved make him a first-class documentarian, joining him to that great body of storytellers who amass what formal history cannot

He was a pioneer of the psychological novel

James created admirable women characters (often a weak point in a male novelist) and his book explores the old-fashioned but nevertheless sound idea that there are fine souls and absolutely appalling people in a world which is not composed of similar self-seeking anti-heroes and anti-heroines. Evil is always present in James and it appears in this book charming, insidious and poisonous to all the good things in the world. A chilling but compelling book to read in the sun

Fear stalks James's pages like grotesquerie in Dickens, like testosterone in Hemingway, like magic in Angela Carter

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