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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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