Patrick Balfour (1904-1977), journalist in Fleet Street in the 30s, third Baron Kinross in 1939, part of the Oxford circle of Evelyn Waugh and set.

 Bright Young Things (2003)
Stephen Campbell Moore and Emily Mortimer in Stephen Fry's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. 

Adam Fenwick-Symes is a young would-be novelist (sometimes engaged to Nina Blount) who has the manuscript of his memoirs confiscated by Customs when he returns to England from a trip across the Channel.  It is a bad crossing.  Some of his books -- one on Economics and his copy of Dante's Purgatorio -- are taken as well.

I was reminded of this scene in Vile Bodies (1930) by a recent Reuters report of new Homeland Security policies, permitting U.S. Federal agents to search and seize laptops "without suspicion of wrongdoing" and to hold them and such electronic equipment for "unspecified periods."

"Patriotic friends and relatives will scoff," I wrote to a New York friend and frequent world traveler, "but this news gives me pause.  I have been encouraged by overseas acquaintances to flee before it is too late.  Now I wonder: can I leave my laptop behind?  I feel like Pippa Strachey, who refused to be evacuated from London during the Blitz because she could not imagine living in anything but Georgian rooms.  She felt the change in proportions would be more fatal than Hitler's bombs."

My East Coast correspondent replied, "All my iPod files are on my laptop -- I would have to replace everything from Rufus W. to Lotte Lenya to Jo Stafford to Juliette Greco to Elizabethan madrigals and Bulgarian throat singers to those divine recordings of Edith Sitwell reading her own poetry.  It would be like having my heart cut out at JFK Immigration."

"Perhaps," I wrote back, "it is best to resign ourselves.  I expect I may perish in one of the detention camps they've set up along the border.  An ancestor of mine died during the Civil War in Andersonville, so I am hoping the ability to succumb quickly to unsanitary conditions, starvation and squalor is genetic.  And you?"

"I should probably," my friend wrote in return, "lay in a supply of potent pills."

In the meantime, of course, you don't have to worry.  You don't have a funny name or suspiciously ethnic background, you're not the wrong religion or color or gay and you've never had impure thoughts or dabbled in drugs or written or said anything you might be sorry for.  Nothing to worry about, comrade.

Besides, as Agatha Runcible told Adam Fenwick-Symes, you don't want to fuss or you'll miss the train.