“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... comes through passion … He said I could not go on identifying with Goethe, he said Goethe was a coward and had never lived his life.Holms is a fascinating study in himself, one of those upper-class Englishmen who got by for an implausibly long time on their wartime military cross and the promise of their genius, though he only ever published one short ...”

“... as Shelley’s Queen Mab (‘Religion drives his wife raving mad’), Frederick Robinson’s Coward Conscience (‘It’s enough to drive one out of his senses’) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (‘A strange hand about me would drive me absolutely frantic’), Dormer had to work out, Ogilvie explains, whether or not these quotations ...”

“... his 33 years’. Coats was in India, and before long Channon was infatuated with Rattigan. Noël Coward told Channon that the ‘alliance’ was ‘one of the romances of the century’. After ‘our honeymoon’ in Brighton in January 1945, Channon showered Rattigan with gifts. His Diaries are a catalogue of Fabergé trinkets, bibelots and jewellery, given ...”

“... only obtain as conditions are laid down; a person may flee from the plague without being a coward, nor is a soldier necessarily cowardly who takes part in an orderly military retreat. Falstaff is no more a coward at Gadshill than Crab the dog is hard-hearted.But at Shrewsbury there is a change. Throughout this First ...”

“... reduced to being a cheerleader; Dad the World War Two fighter pilot hero (actually considered a coward outside of Kennebunkport, but that’s another story), Junior mainly AWOL from the dinky Texas Air National Guard; Dad the successful oil man, Junior losing fortunes on dry wells, continually bailed out by Dad’s friends. When the black sheep loser ...”

“... Dartford-style, almost every day on my way home from school. I know what it is like to be a coward. I will never go back there. As easy as it was to turn tail, I took the beatings … They didn’t call it Gravesend for nothing. Everything unwanted by anyone else had been dumped in Dartford since the late 19th century – isolation and smallpox ...”

“... for nothing.’ The German foreign minister, Ribbentrop, denounced Franco as an ‘ungrateful coward’. Hitler told Mussolini at their next meeting that he would rather ‘have three teeth taken out’ than endure another nine hours of fruitless negotiations with Franco. Spain did send a number of workers and soldiers to help Germany, but as the war went ...”

“... wasn’t a straightforward thing: ‘The civilian soldier was sometimes brave and sometimes a coward and, still more often, exceedingly brave to hide his fear.’ As Beecroft puts it, ‘I suppose one can get used to any sort of beastliness.’ They had their diversions. Swimming was one, if they could avoid the dead mules. Footballs appeared from ...”

“... than his elder brother, he was the good time who was had by all, including, it was said, Noël Coward and the Duchess of Argyll. Of their sister, Princess Mary, who married the Earl of Harewood in 1922, history has had little to say and disappointingly Cadbury has nothing to add. In her detailed account of the family’s responses to the abdication, the ...”