It’s been a long time since I’ve posted an exemplary sentence, but The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard, is full of them. Very arch, and often funny. I’m only about half-way through, but here are a few:
“Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned a task so she could resent it.”
“She need not say, she said, that she loved them.”
“Saturday afternoon in England is a rehearsal for the end of the world.”
Of course the novel takes place largely in England.