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unearths some literary gems.
From Blotto, Twinks and the Intimate Revue, by Simon Brett:
***[Airheaded toff Blotto compliments a woman on her looks]"You're a real bellbuzzer with three veg and gravy."***"The cream of Scotland Yard are all clotted."***"Don't nit-pick noodles!"***He didn't think Araminta fffrench-Wyndeau looked very happy either. She was still as silent as the second and third fs in her surname.[Btw, I note the one-upping theme here, as Brett outdoes the real British lexicon. First "with three veg" (as opposed to the more familiar two), and now a three-f fffrench.]***"Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the cigarette holder." [This is one of many defective witticisms uttered by a character who is supposedly "the wittiest man in London," and whose repertoire consists of broken Wildeisms, epigrams that begin like quips but end like boring, literal observations, and so on.]***"Lawkins!" said Twinks. And she meant it.***"Tickey-Tockey," said Twinks, though without the vim she usually put into a "Tickey-Tockey."***[Bonus: In sending up 1920s aristo types, as you may have gathered, Brett favors silly pseudo-slang that he's apparently coined himself over historically authentic slang. Here's my favorite from this book: giving someone the idiomatic cold shoulder becomes giving them "the ice cream's elbow."]
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unearths some literary gems.
From Jeeves and the Leap of Faith, by Ben Schott:
*** "I suppose there's a snag?".... "Two, actually: Evadne and Lancelot." "Eh?" "Her Ma and Pa." This sounded like one large, amalgamated snag, but Gussie informed me otherwise.
*** "We should strike while the whatnot is hot."
*** Jeeves permitted himself a riotous twitch of the eyebrow.
*** "Why don't you just make things up? I bet no one would twig if you invented a dowager duchess or two."
** "I knew those cummerbunds were an incident waiting to happen."
** "The garden looks like...a birthday cake!"
[The character who says this turns out to be Wittgenstein--and, according to Schott's endnotes (remember, his reputation rests on trivia, not fiction) a remark along those lines can actually be traced to real-life Wittgenstein's criticism of the grounds at Cambridge.]
*** A smile inched across Gussie's face, transforming it from lugubrious haddock to exuberant flat-fish.
*** "[I have] News. Pages of it. You might use me to wrap fish 'n' chips."
*** How Jeeves accomplishes his effortless omniscience is one of those eternal, unfathomable mysteries, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or Percy Gorringe's side-whiskers--which, now I picture them, also hang pretty Babylonically.
*** He unleashed the italics. "Sir?"
*** The emotions that swept across Aunt Agatha's face--shock, bafflement, fury, doubt--wove a Bayeux Tapestry of indignation. ***
[Bonus: "Toe over kettle" as an alternative to "head over heels" or "base over "apex." Googling suggests that this is a Schott original.]
[Bonus: When Bertie gives a fake name and address to a constable (as of course is traditional in the canon), it turns out in the endnotes that Schott has used a "real" fake address--namely, the street address of a real-life London facade that was built merely "to conceal a venting area of the Metropolitan Railway."]
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unearths some literary gems.
From Wodehouse's Spring Fever:***"Oh, very well, very well. Here is five pounds.""Couldn't you make it ten?""No, I could not make it ten," said Lady Adela, with the testiness of a conjurer asked to do too difficult a trick.***[Gratuitously Quantifying Things dept.]“Don’t you see what a wonderful opportunity this will be for you to become hep to my hidden depths?”“You haven’t any.”“I have, too. Dozens.”**[Nonsense dept.]Nobody, of course, who enjoyed the pleasure of intimacy with him, expected him to talk anything but nonsense, but he need not, she felt, have descended to such utter nonsense, as that of which he had been guilty last night.
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unearths some literary gems.
Wodehouse is in his nineties, and he's no longer standing on ceremony:"The intelligent reader will recall, though the vapid and unreflective reader may have forgotten..."This from The Plot That Thickened, which also gives us the following:"[She was] always insisting that their position demanded that they entertain as dinner guests people whom, if left to himself, he would not have asked to dinner with a ten-foot pole."AND... a nightclub orchestra called Herman Zilch and His Twelve What-Nots!
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unearths some literary gems.
*** "He's a nice little man, but I think he has an awful lot of imagination. All his reasons for believing anything are terribly complicated, and he counts them off on his fingers. He holds up one finger and says, 'Point 1'; and then, when he has explained that, he holds up another finger and says, 'Point 2.'" [Later] "Now!" Carlo [the "nice little man"] paused, and Cabot knew without seeing it that he had raised a forefinger in the darkness. "Point 1...." *** "She sits there staring at me through those big glasses, and the glasses seem to get bigger and bigger." *** "I want you to give me the dope on that in something flat." *** "And Mr. Carlo Pugh....peering down into cupboards or drawers through a big round glass, like a man who was spying upon a pixy or sticking his nose into a leprechaun's business." *** "Everything seems impossible before breakfast."
[I note that if everything is impossible before breakfast, then the White Queen doesn't have to be selective when deciding which impossible things to do before breakfast--anything at all will meet the case!]
*** "She whirled around and darted in here and had the door locked before I could say Jack Robinson--" Kroll snapped, "Why the hell did you want to say Jack Robinson?"
*** [Conclusions as a Physical Place dept.]
"I know what conclusions you're coming to, Cabot," he drawled. "I got there in time to welcome you."
[Bonus: The protagonist avoids a dangerous accident by dodging a bust of Socrates that has been sent plummeting down from the top of a bookcase.]
[Additional scanned snippet attached.]
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