From The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, by Gilbert Adair:

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Even the grandfather clock stopped ticking--or else tick-tocked on tiptoe.

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It was the sort of sound that, in their stage directions, playwrights tend to convey as "ahem" and you could actually hear the two syllables "a" and "hem" in Chitty's cough.

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"It was she who solved the identical-twin fratricide in Faber or Faber, am I right?"

[N.B. The real-life book, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, is published by Faber & Faber. And, for good measure, the owner of the country house is named ffolkes, echoing the lowercase double-f of the F&F logo.]

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"He said 'Dahling!' all the time, to all of us indiscriminately.... I chanced to catch him brushing away a fly that had settled on the rim of his cocktail glass and I actually heard him say, 'Buzz off, dahling!'"

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"When he burbled on incessantly about the finest this and the greatest that, you felt you were being sprayed by the spittle of exclamation marks."

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"To say that he drawled isn't the half of it. His whole body drawled."

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"Gentry... opined that The Green Hat was 'remembered only for having been forgotten.'"

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"Certainly," she answered, a tiny smoke-ring drifting over her head like a halo in search of a saint.

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[Literary Whatstheirnames dept.]

"He was a beast... with his T.S. this and his D.H. that...."

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"Molnar--the Hungarian playwright, you know, entrancing man, as witty as a barrel of monkeys."

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"Clem... is someone utterly incapable of losing his temper. Indeed, according to Cynthia, he's so absent-minded his temper is just about the only thing he never does manage to lose."

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Evelyn Mount, meanwhile, was wearing... shoes so sensible, as they say, you felt like consulting them on whether you should cash in your shares in Amalgamated Copper.

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"Cora has had no fewer than three husbands. It is three, isn't it, Cora darling?"

"Four, darling, if you count the Count."

"I never count the Count."

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"One was The Vamp of the Pampas. Ooh, was that hot stuff!"

"Language, Addie, language! This isn't Paris, you know."

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"It was called No Murder in the Title...."

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Dolly stuck her forefinger in the dead centre of her brow as though to indicate, for everyone's benefit, the exact location of her hunch.

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He even, nobody quite knew how, contrived to slam doors open.

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"Cora could tell her stories to the back of the Clapham omnibus and never know the difference."

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["Fictitious novel titles that postcurse JC-E titles" dept.]

The Proof of the Pudding

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It was almost as though she had spoken in italics, almost as though they could feel the hairs stand up on the napes of their necks, almost as though those hairs, too, were in italics.