“This is who Ezra is dating now. He is now into girls who are into dressing up as nineteenth century prostitutes. For the hats.”

“In the nineteenth century, poetry was a bestselling genre rather than the cultish phenomenon it is now.”

“The thing of it was that the girls in my class who date boys do hardly anything else. Girls who I used to think were just boring I now think stupid beyond belief. I call them A-Girls and it is not a compliment.”

“I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one.”

“Difficult for actors to extemporise in nineteenth-century English. Except for Robert Hardy and Elizabeth Spriggs, who speak that way anyway.”

“... he said it felt like walking into another century, being there, looking up at the mullion windows, all darkened now, and the castellated towers that rose up out of the clutch of the ivy. "And you," he said, "you look like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, with your beautifully serious face and your grave, grey eyes. So do you have a suitably romantic story to tell?”