Harry Mead has some brief encounters with the famous and infamous, from writers and inventors to 'sexual exhibitionists', in an array of fascinating glimpses into other people's lives.

WODEHOUSE: a life by Robert McCrum (Penguin Viking, £20)

TAKEN at face value, the early life of PG Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves, Lord Emsworth (and his cherished pig the Empress of Blandings), was as cheerful and sunny as his stories. Of his childhood he said: "It went like a breeze from start to finish". His father, a colonial administrator, was "as normal as rice pudding".

But between the ages of three and 15 Wodehouse saw his parents for only six months. While they were abroad, he lived in nurseries, foster homes and boarding schools. Though this might have produced a dark personality, McCrum argues that with Wodehouse it worked the other way round. His comic novels were a retreat into a fantasy world to hide the pain of deprivation.

Hmm, well... Wodehouse had a strong, though largely sexless, marriage, whose 60-year span covered most of his writing career. And McCrum quotes Wodehouse's own dismissal of fancy theories to explain an author's work. "Why do these fellows always think there is something hidden and mysterious behind one's writing?"

Still, there might be something in McCrum's theory. Wodehouse suffered depression after finishing each book. He visited his mother only once in the last ten years of her life, which suggests some kind of fracture.

There are other surprises too. Wodehouse didn't shine in company. His sparkling prose was the product of many drafts. Sharply conscious of money, he always struck a shrewd deal in marketing his work.

Of Wodehouse's controversial wartime broadcasts from Berlin, for which many British people never forgave him, McCrum takes the charitable and now generally accepted view that Wodehouse simply didn't appreciate the offence his light-hearted talks would cause. But this leaves unanswered the question of why Wodehouse recorded the last two of the five broadcasts when he knew the others had attracted criticism. Could he really have been such an innocent abroad?

Still an enigma, then, Wodehouse will continue to attract biographers, of whom McCrum is the sixth. He certainly hits the spot on Wodehouse's enduring appeal: "Wodehouse still promises a release from everyday cares into a paradise of innocent comic mayhem, narrated in prose so light and airy and so perfectly pitched that the perusal of a few pages rarely fails to banish the demons of darkness and despair."

Small wonder that one fan keeps two complete sets of Wodehouse, one upstairs, the other downstairs.

GEORGE STEPHENSON by Hunter Davies (Sutton, £8.99)

DESPITE George Stephenson's long presence on the £5 note, Hunter Davies feels he doesn't receive the popular acclaim he deserves.

"Some people confuse him with Robert Louis Stevenson... He didn't even make the top 20 in a recent poll to find the Greatest Britons. His great rival Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was far less influential in the birth of railways, did much better, being voted number two, behind Winston Churchill. Brunel, for some reason, has increasingly emerged over the decades as a much more glamorous figure. He did wear that awful distinctive stove pipe hat, which has helped his image and identification. He was also educated, son of a famous knighted father, southern born and polished, while Stephenson was uneducated, Northern and rough.''

Colours firmly nailed to the mast there, in a new introduction to this biography, first published in 1975. Amazingly - perhaps evidence for Davies' gloomy assessment of Stephenson's public standing - no other general biography of Stephenson has appeared in the intervening 29 years. Leaving Davies unchallenged in the field, this could be good news for Stephenson, who is unlikely to have a more pugnacious or persuasive champion.

"As the Father of Railways, George Stephenson left the world a totally different place," says Davies. "Since the dawn of civilisation man had moved at the speed of the fastest horse. After Stephenson, life on the planet was never the same again... people were brought nearer one another and the world began to shrink.''

Incapable of writing a dull word, Davies presents a detailed yet eminently readable portrait of the one-time North-East pit boy who made this possible.

HUMPHREY DAVY: Life Beyond the Lamp by Raymond Lamont-Brown (Sutton, £18.99)

HUNTER Davies devotes a chapter to The Safety Lamp Row, the rivalry between George Stephenson and Humphrey Davy over which of them invented the miners' safety lamp. Davies' account, the fuller of the two, argues that Stephenson was hard done by when the credit officially went to Davy. But he minimises the matter: "To George the safety lamp was a little one-off job, an interlude from his major preoccupation (railways)." This is a little unkind to Davy, whose development of the lamp followed an invitation based on his already considerable achievements as a chemist. Through lectures, Cornish-born Davy popularised science, and he did pioneering work on electrolysis, in agricultural chemistry and other fields of science. He also wrote poetry, had a boisterous marriage, and mixed in leading literary circles, once climbing Helvellyn with Wordsworth and Walter Scott. All are chronicled in this biography, which gives short shrift to Stephenson and his lamp.

BRIEF LIVES by W F Deedes (Macmillan, £12.99)

A CABINET Minister in Harold Macmillan's government in the 1960s and later editor of The Daily Telegraph, Bill Deedes, now 91, has met an extraordinary range of prominent people, from Stanley Baldwin, a pre-war Prime Minster, and Noel Coward, to Imelda Marcos and Mary Whitehouse.

His recollections of them, many gained over what sometimes seems like a perpetual lunch, make easy and occasionally revealing reading. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sallied forth from No.10 to buy husband Denis's breakfast bacon, because it "had to be just as he liked it, and only she knew what he liked".

ROGUES, VILLAINS AND ECCENTRICS: An A-Z of Roguish Britons Through the Ages by William Donaldson (Phoenix Paperback, £9.99)

UP-to-the-minute with Michael Barrymore ("troubled funnyman") and Kenneth Noye ("gangster, gold-smuggler, property-developer and murderer") but also including such distant figures as William and Margaret Cripple, "sexual exhibitionists'' of the 16th century, and Edric, a Saxon prince who killed his father, the king, by thrusting a dagger into his bowels as he used the lavatory, here is a gorgeous gallery of often endearing, sometimes appalling, but always off-the-scale Britons. Coupled with the hundreds of main entries is a brilliant cross-referencing system that enable subjects to be found or explored: eg "judge confuses witness with Marilyn Monroe. See Rice-Davies, Mandy.'' And similar: "judges, odd, vicious or wrong-headed" - preceding a long list of names (well there would be, wouldn't there?). Unputdownable.

Published: 08/02/2005