You're one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it.

From Wodehouse's The Girl in Blue(p.35):

'...How well do you know your Chaucer?'
'My what?'
'The father of English poetry.'
'Oh, that Chaucer?'

Later (p.55) a neat summary from mother to child on how to catch a man:

a man who writes little poems can't have any sales resistance.

The little dialogue from which this is snatched is interesting as a sort of female-version of the ars amatoria.

Later (p.70) a reference to Roman eating habits:

Jerry had abandoned his original idea of making the sort of lunch that would have appealed to the Roman emperor Vitellius,...

[Above: The rather heavy 8th emperor of Rome in question]

Later still (p.90) we find Vitellius' contemporary Pliny the Elder:

 How true is the old saying, attributed to Pliny the Elder, that a man who lets himself get above himself is simply asking for it, for it is just when things seem to be running as smooth as treacle out of a jug that he finds Fate waiting fr him round the corner with the stuffed eelskin.