More often, friends say, the man with impeccable manners is "drawn to the fight".
Michael Irwin's The Skull and the Nightingale (HarperCollins) is a bold and witty appropriation of the conventions, style, and idiom of the 18th-century epistolary novel that brilliantly recreates the manners, modes of thought and conduct of the teeming world of London.
I suspect a clown father would have better things on his mind than table manners.
"In life, if you have an enthusiasm for what they call good manners, sometimes people don't quite believe you.
Nighy gets his manners, and impeccable tailoring, from his father.
The "make-up" of the three Cabinet ministers is as close an approximation as possible to the features, dress, and manners of the originals, and the fun of the thing consists partly in placing them in ridiculous situations, and partly in making them utter ludicrous exaggerations of the sentiments which they are supposed to profess or act upon in their public conduct.
You could tell from their accents and manners that these were not Parisians; they were kids from the banlieues – the poor suburbs to the north of Paris, connected to the city by the trains running into the Gare du Nord.
At the Sydney Writers' festival this week to talk not only about that book but participate in a session on humour, debauchery and manners, here's your chance to put a question to one of the most controversial and distinctive writers of our times.
Giving evidence the previous day, Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail owner, said it would be "bad manners" to discuss business openly on social occasions.
No less an authority than Chris Hoy remarked on this in an interview for the Telegraph, saying that nothing winds him up more than bad manners on a bike.
There is also an element of Carlyles having been in the right place at the right time just when the pernicious old dichotomy between gritty proletarian realism and English middle-class manners was being replaced, for a whole range of reasons, with a much more productive inclusiveness.
