“... our Finest Man.’ But after that the story dies away in minor ditties by Sagittarius, Noel Coward and William Scammell. Regretting the ‘remarkable shortage’ of ‘good, straight’ verse written about ‘public events in England over the past thirty years’, our anthologist adopts a policy of charitable evacuation. His collection seems to suggest ...”

“... Zimmerman of displaying ‘the disadvantages of openness’, of patronising Cather and making a coward of her. I’m not sure that openness is ever really a disadvantage, though over-simplification is; the autobiographical must be important for a writer who insists on the authenticity of her stories as memory. Her alienation from conventional femininity may ...”

“... place. Dear Ike. This distinction may be a helpful one. Though Eisenhower might have been a moral coward on matters such as McCarthyism and segregation, he often expressed himself in private as a prisoner of public opinion and regarded colleagues like Nixon, for example, as distasteful political necessities. His mind was broader than his circle, and he had an ...”

“... prefers – in this case less plausibly – to stick with his view of Chaucer as a determined coward (in which case he hardly needed to write such a provocative poem at all). At least commentators are agreed on one thing: texts written by members of one faction or another during a period of deadly civil war are especially likely not to tell the whole or ...”

“... monster – overbearing, coarse, bullying, dishonest, indeed utterly crooked, and a physical coward. Rose, however, had a better press, as the woman who somehow held her large family together while her husband philandered with an endless series of showgirls and starlets. Hamilton destroys this hypocritical myth once and for all: Rose and Joe were both ...”

“... approval’ of ‘wits so exquisite and discriminating’ as Raymond Mortimer, Noël Coward and Desmond Shawe-Taylor; on the publication of a book of poems a flurry of plaudits – ‘grimly entertaining’, ‘brilliantly funny and intimate’ – is produced. Barbera and McBrien summarise and categorise her output according to theme; they treat ...”

“... in Tennyson Jesse. She lists some sirs, some publishers, and, at various points, Conrad, Maugham, Coward and Walpole, but she doesn’t tell us enough of what they said about her subject to persuade us that they are peculiarly valuable testaments to her incandescence. She does have a lot to say about the queue of eager aides and secretaries who acted as ...”

“... Smartly-rhyming lyrics drip down the page (and we know how Burgess enjoys the Byronic smartness of Coward-and-Porter verses), but we don’t feel that we’re at a Broadway show: it’s more like a knowing undergraduates’ ‘intimate revue’ – and your reviewer, as plain music-reader, would like Burgess’s tunes to be attached. (Words and music are best ...”

“... there was more time for a circle of friends that included the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Noël Coward and Benjamin Britten. As time and death thinned the old guard she made new friendships, notably with Ted Hughes, arranging to split the laureate’s traditional allowance of sherry with him. Amid the fun there was an inevitably growing number of letters of ...”

“... are ye, when men shall revile you’ – which allowed her to think of Josh as a coward, but the incident took its toll, as did the later expulsion of a favourite aunt for fornication. (The church also voted out loyal members from time to time, in scenes which again suggest that uninhibited collective sadism was a motivating ...”

“... a live squid into the bedroom misfired badly and in the end she had to go and stay with Noël Coward. Maurice Bowra told Edith Sitwell that he would shoot himself if Lehmann had one more affair: he could no longer stand ‘being kept up all night’ while she ‘examined her and everybody else’s motives’. Bowra christened her, unkindly but ...”

“... with French. Insults and derogatory terms owe much to the French example – bastard, brute, coward, rascal, idiot. French oozes from the language of food and drink: chowder echoes the old French chaudière, meaning a cooking pot, while crayfish started out as escrevise before the English chopped off its initial vowel (something they also did with ...”

“... VI Part I (Act II, Scene iv) that it entered the popular imagination:Somerset: Let him that is no coward nor no flattererBut dare maintain the party of the truthPluck a red rose from off this thorn with me.Warwick: I love no colours; and without all colourOf base insinuating flattery,I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet.It was another two hundred years ...”

“... to the failure of art to detach him from the maelstroms of public fame and private despair. Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence make an unsettling odd couple in a February 1931 New Yorker, their writhing bodies entangled and wrestling on the ground. As his large hand circles her thin neck, it fixes the actress’s long fingers and fingernails in rigor ...”

“... then he is of a weak and servile spirit; if grave, then proud; if considerate in danger, then a coward; if valorous, rash; if silent, cunning; if a discourses, then one that loves to hear himself talk. When John Baptist came neither eating, nor drinking, they said he had a devil; and when our Saviour came eating, and drinking, they said, ‘Behold a ...”