From stories by Phyllis Bentley:

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[Unintentionally Airborne Eyewear dept. I note that where Lord Emsworth's pince-nez seem to fly off his face through a sort of cartoonish pathetic fallacy (cf. American Cornball on the "hat take"), this author gives a sort of physics-driven accounting for the phenomenon. (Now I'm envisioning a Rube Goldberg contraption wherein step 37 involves unfurling a poster that astonishes a pince-nez-wearing personage who is seated there for this purpose; the flying pince-nez then land someplace so as to trigger step 38.)]

Astonishment so distorted the little novelist's features that her old-fashioned pince-nez slipped off her nose; they flew through the air on the end of their chain and came to rest with a click against the large black button on her bosom.

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[A rhetorical question that the protagonist wants to answer--but doesn't.]

"Words, words, words!" said he. "Who was it said that the use of words is to conceal thought?"

Miss Phipps longed to inform him, but she did not dare.

***

The Vicar...pronouncing solemn and beautiful sentences...turned and led the cortège toward the altar.

[I like the generic reference to "beautiful sentences." Sort of like asking a pianist to "play something--anything."]

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[Bonus (Fail x2): You can imagine my delight when, in the course of one story, the protagonists referred to an earlier "case of the ubiquitous mannequin." There were additional references, culiminating in a hypothetical "mannequin parade"--a phrase that, alas, burst the bubble in the same instant that it overjoyed me: because, of course, this made it clear that these were "mannequins" merely in the sense of living models. And then, a second disappointment followed when a glance at a list of all stories in this series (not all of which were included in the compilation I read) showed that the tale about the mannequins was a "real" one and not, as I'd initially hoped, a nonexistent story-we'll-never-hear à la Doyle's Giant Rat of Sumatra. (:v>]