"You Tickle Me Spitless, Baby"
Isidore Ostrer, one of three brothers, Jewish refugees from the Ukraine, who founded Gainsborough Pictures eked out a precarious early livelihood "playing dominoes for cash on trains between the Essex coast and Liverpool Street". The novelist and screenwriter Nigel Balchin was also the inventor of the Aero chocolate bar. Susan Shaw, a pallid wimpette of the Rank Charm School, was actually born Patsy Sloots. (Now there's a name that's both prosaic and eccentric!) When promoting her films in provincial cinemas, Jean Kent always brought along her own bouquet of flowers "in case they didn't have one". And, perhaps most haunting of all, at the age of 16 Dulcie Gray, sweet little Dulcie Gray, the darling of Shaftesbury Avenue coach parties, the quintessence of middlebrow gentility (her whispered nickname among film crews was "Gracie Dull"), escaped from her abominated Malayan home and, while still in her teens, "ran a girls' boarding school, ate opium, crushed monstrous black scorpions by the brace and wrote a popular song entitled 'You Tickle Me Spitless, Baby'." Dulcie Gray!

Gilbert Adair (reviewing Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet), The Spectator, 26 February 2005

The home front
The war, in its character of petty pilferer, had been as busy in this little town as in London, and, for a woman's personal needs, the shops had little save frustration, irritation, or delay to offer in almost every department.

There were no stockings, there was no shampoo, there was no scent, there were no hairpins, no nail-varnish, no nail-varnish-remover, no ribbon, no watch-glasses, not watches to lend you while you waited for watch-glasses which might or might not come, no glycerine, no batteries for your torch, no scissors, no darning wool, no olive oil...

The pilferer, who for some reason had no taste for cocoa (which you could buy and bathe in if you had the money), had been here, there, and everywhere...

The pilferer was an insatiable reader, too Miss Roach spent a good deal of time at the library failing to find anything she wanted to take out.

Patrick Hamilton The Slaves of Solitude (1947)

Tony Blair's grasp on truth
The first sound of bats flapping in his belfry was heard even before the election, in December 1996, when he told Des O'Connor that as a 14-year-old he had run away to Newcastle airport and boarded a plane for the Bahamas: "I snuck onto the plane, and we were literally about to take off when the stewardess came up to me..."

Quite how he managed this without a boarding card or passport was not explained. It certainly came as a surprise to his father ("The Bahamas? Who said that? Tony? Never"), and an even greater surprise to staff at the airport, who pointed out that there has never been a flight from Newcastle to the Bahamas.

A couple of years later, he told an interviewer that his "teenage hero" was the footballer Jackie Milburn, whom he would watch from the seats behind the goal at St James's Park. In fact, Milburn played his last game for Newcastle United when Blair was just four years old, and there were no seats behind the goal at the time.

Francis Wheen, Guardian, 23 February 2000

Elfin beauty
She was a very pretty shade of green - a pure delicate tint, such as might have been cast on a white eggshell by the sun shining through the young foliage of a beech tree. Her hair, brows, and lashes were a darker shade; her lashes lay on her green cheek like a miniature fern frond. Her teeth were perfectly right. Her skin was so nearly transparent that the blue veins on her wrists and breast showed through like some exquisitely marbled cheese.

Sylvia Townsend Warner "Elphenor and Weasel" in Kingdoms of Elfin (1977)