Dinner-party

An attempt at entrées and removes failed at the first dinner-party.

[H]aving a dinner-party at his rooms to entertain some friends from London, nothing would satisfy Mr. Foker but painting Mr. Buck’s door vermilion, in which freak he was caught by the proctors …

Walter, yet new in his spousedom, was more amenable than an older hand ; but Rosa had no want of anxiety in this her first dinner-party.

"She knows well enough I like her," so his liking said in confidence to his vanity, and even he hardly overheard them talk; "better a great deal than I knew it myself, till old Strafford got together this confounded stupid dinner-party (he caught Miss Chattesworth glancing at him with a peculiar look of inquiry). Why the plague did he ask me here? it was Puddock's turn, and he likes venison and compots,[…]"

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly and storing reminiscences &emdash; for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect — if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water.

We gave such dinner-parties as our commissariat allowed; the menu was simplicity itself - " blanket " for every course, cunningly disguised as soup, entree, and, I was going to say, joint.

She is only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of her own detestably over-cultivated garden. I’m sick of being told that it’s the envy of the neighbourhood; it’s like everything else that belongs to her—her car, her dinner-parties, even her headaches, they are all superlative; no one else ever had anything like them.

"Oysters and whitebait and a tin of pate, peaches and a pineapple and one of our fowls; well, a woman might like to give herself a nice little dinner once in a while, but not a bottle of wine at four shillings and a three and sixpenny tin of cigarettes, for I never will believe she's took to drink and smoking of a suddent, so own up, Mr. Widgett, it's a little dinner-party on your account."

After recording the Dostoievskyan dinner-party at the Metropole Hotel, Moscow, on 1 October and meditating on the effects of Stravinsky’s exile, Craft wrote in his Diary: ‘I am certain that to be recognised and acclaimed as a Russian in Russia, and to be performed there, has meant more to him than anything else in the years I have known him.’