From Stage Fright, by Gillian Linscott:

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The Crispin is a small theatre wedged apologetically into a side street near Charing Cross station.

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His eyebrows had that little lift to them that makes a person look clever even if he isn't.

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[The American-born wife of an English aristocrat talks about storming out of the dining room when fed up with her husband.]

"The trouble was, I was so blazing mad I'd forgotten that when the hostess walks out all the other women get up and walk out with her. And would you believe that's just what they did, right in the middle of dessert? There I was, out on the terrace..., and eleven English ladies in formal dress trailed after me, wondering what they were supposed to do next."

[Later on, it's explained that the aristocrat is baffled as to how to react when an airplane carrying his wife and her presumed lover crash-lands on his property--because there's no social "precedent" for how one behaves in that particular situation.]

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with a dazed look on his face, like Hamlet who's just been told that soliloquies are out of fashion

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["I'm not sure your metaphor really works, but I like it anyway" dept.]

If London has a Bohemia I suppose Bloomsbury is it, but at eleven o'clock on a November night, with a few street lamps and bare plane trees, it looked as carefree as a frozen dishcloth.