First published in 1892, WH Mallock's A Human Document is the surprisingly salacious tale of a love affair between a supposedly respectable gentleman and a married woman.
Henry Morton, a manly (and, yes, entirely honorable) police constable with the Bow Street Magistrate's Court, is just the fellow to investigate the disgraceful death of a respectable young gentleman.
In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a multilayered literary classic that is, in essence, a study of an extreme DID case: a respectable Victorian gentleman and a bestial monster residing in the same body.
Originally I thought Mr Dasgupta was just some sad kid in his bedroom, but no, it's this respectable gentleman.
A day after The Independent reported on the discovery of a new photograph of the Prime Minister in his Bullingdon Club finery, tucked away in the corridor leading to the shop's toilet, Oxford's most respectable gentleman's outfitters has barred the public from its restroom.
He credited Ethelred with having written "Exeant seniores duodecim thani, et praefectus cum eis, et jurent super sanctuarium quod eis in manus datur," which he translated in a footnote: "Twelve respectable gentlemen shall go forth and in a private place will command and call to witness persons under oath".
Perhaps cricket's great attraction for them is that it is one of the few occasions when otherwise respectable gentlemen, well past their teenage years, feel it reasonable, desirable, mandatory even, to begin drinking shortly after play commences at 11am.
Lutz conjures a time when people like Boyce and his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti revelled in free love, and when "respectable gentlemen" who had other tastes "prowled the night streets of London for young grenadiers to bend them over in a public toilet".
The jurymen recall their own wayward youth, but they are now respectable gentlemen and no longer have any sympathy for the Defendant.
The Council is actually continuing to hide behind a kind of gentlemen's agreement concluded at some point in the early 1970s - forty years ago - whereby Parliament and the Council agreed not to interfere in each other's budgets, not to look into each other's books and to let everything pass, like respectable gentlemen.
