While I enjoyed the airy persiflage that dominated these stories about Boy (hard to believe that even in the 1880s someone would name their son that!), his sister Daphne and her husband Berry & his cousins Jonah and Jill (aka Berry & Co.), the humor was more mild than the laugh-out-loud humor of Wodehouse or Saki. And I couldn't help having the lowering thought that if I were one of the girls that Boy flirted with, I would have been dreadfully dull and said things like "I don't know what you mean"... Still, this 1914 collection was a good light read & I look forward to reading more in the Berry series. ( )

Having read Yates's Chandos novels I was surprised at how slight (not in a pejorative sense) the Berry stories are. The style is winning and the writing enjoyable, even though the plot of each story is identical! Although frequently compared to Wodehouse, these stories have a languid quality more akin to the essays of A.A Milne. ( )