The eccentric Sir George Sitwell, the father of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, had a valet called Henry Moat, who would also have been called eccentric had he not been a plain-speaking Yorkshireman. One evening after lugging a heavy trunk up the stairs of an Italian hotel he opened the door with his elbow and threw the heavy object on to the bed in the darkened room. It was unfortunate that the novelist Hall Caine was attempting to restore his frayed nerves in that very bed.
Hall Caine, the first man in England to sell a million copies of a novel, is also the first recorded man to use a construction that is still controverted. ‘Suddenly the mischief of her sex came dancing into her blood, and she could not help but plague the lad,’ he wrote in The Manxman (1894), in a scene where Kate teases Pete, who has thrown gravel up at her window before dawn.
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