As Punch once wrote, criticising P.G. Wodehouse ‘is like taking a spade to souffle’. In Leave it to Psmith Wodehouse creates an England unsullied by war, with quaint towns unchanged with the centuries, and delightfully absent-minded earls live in grand country estates whose sweeping vistas hide secretaries to be feared and where domestic staff are hatching plots and could be detectives in disguise.

e. e. cummings' The Enormous Room is an autographical novel written as prose but which reads as poetry. While volunteering for the French in WWI, cummings was arrested and interned for four months without trial - he recounts the experience with the detached air of an ironic intellectual facing the absurd.