Bring On the Girls!

[1] Subtitled "The Improbable Story of Our Life in Musical Comedy, With Pictures To Prove It", it takes the form of a series of partly fictionalised, partly apocryphal stories centred on the world of Broadway, where both Wodehouse and Bolton had worked successfully as lyricists, collaborating with the likes of composer Jerome Kern.

It features anecdotes about the larger-than-life characters who dominated Broadway between 1915 and 1930, but the biographer Frances Donaldson writes that it is to be read as entertainment rather than history: "Guy, having once invented an anecdote, told it so often that it was impossible to know whether in the end he believed it or not.

As stated in the book's opening pages: Actors might walk through their parts, singers save their voices, but the personnel of the ensemble never failed to go all out, full of pep, energy and the will to win.

A hundred shows have been pushed by them over the thin line that divides the floperoo from the socko.

), looking back over their years of toil in the musical comedy salt mines, raise their glasses and without hesitation or heel taps drink this toast: "To the Girls!"