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“... 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 ...”

“... to think Wallace is embracing a sort of epistemological anarchy, it could just be that he’s a coward – which is what we might conclude from his essay on Dostoevsky in the Voice Literary Supplement:So, for me anyway, what makes Dostoevsky invaluable is that he possessed a passion, conviction and engagement with deep moral issues that ...”

“... in high and long jumping. He could put up with any amount of corporal punishment ...   I was a coward. I used to be haunted by the fear of thieves, ghosts and serpents. I did not stir out of doors at night. Darkness was a terror to me. It was almost impossible for me to sleep in the dark, as I would imagine ghosts coming from one direction, thieves from ...”

“... this dippy Mamas and Papas tune floating along nicely among the debris. Extraordinary, as Noël Coward put it, how potent cheap music is; extraordinary also how sad. According to Chase Twichell in the poem ‘Why All Good Music Is Sad’, from her first Faber collection Perdido (1991), That’s why all good music is sad. It makes the sound of the end ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the aims of her study is to rescue Gurney’s later work from accusations of madness, and offer it as evidence of his ...”

“... ticks on. The servants are all downstairs, watching TV. Mummy and Daddy have gone to the new Noël Coward at the Globe. Sometimes there is a bang from the street outside – backfire, says Nanny. Sometimes there’s a scream from the cellar – Nanny’s lips tighten, but she doesn’t say anything ... Is it to be wondered at that, from time to time, a window ...”

“... of smoked bacon at the last may prove that he lacked sangfroid, but scarcely proves he was a coward), protesting his innocence to the end. As well he might. A jury of 27 of his peers had convicted him, 26 voting him guilty of rape and 15 finding him guilty of sodomy. But there was no evidence that he had buggered anyone. A male servant, Florence ...”

“... literary types and promising young men – from the ex-queen of Spain to Wallis Simpson to Noël Coward and, on one occasion, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Maugham’s appetite for society sat oddly alongside his aloofness. One guest recalled that he would come to meet new arrivals with outstretched arms in a gesture of welcome, then ‘the arms would drop ...”

“... than those who followed a career in gardening, cookery or design. The Boxes, nicknamed by Noël Coward ‘the Brontës of Shepherds Bush’, didn’t die at the Elephant but neither did they or their contemporaries blaze a trail. The scarcity of female directors and producers in the film industry is still marked and periodically lamented. The same is true ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Farquhar fits the bill completely. But actor-playwrights go back from Marber, Pinter, Osborne and Coward to Jonson and Shakespeare. And if you leave out the Irish (by birth or upbringing), you lose Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw. The source that gave London The Importance of Being Earnest and Arms and the Man a hundred years ago shows no signs ...”

“... 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 ...”