excerpt from three men and a maid - wodehouse

The year 1921, it will be remembered, was a trying one for the

inhabitants of the United States. Every boat that arrived from England
brought a fresh swarm of British lecturers to the country. Novelists,
poets, scientists, philosophers, and plain, ordinary bores; some herd
instinct seemed to affect them all simultaneously. It was like one of
those great race movements of the Middle Ages. Men and women of widely
differing views on religion, art, politics, and almost every other
subject; on this one point the intellectuals of Great Britain were
single-minded, that there was easy money to be picked up on the lecture
platforms of America and that they might just as well grab it as the
next person.