“... 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 ...”

“... night with Michael before he went down to Plymouth’. But he chose to spend it instead with Noël Coward, with whom he was in the midst of a wild romance. The night Vanessa was born, when Larry announced a daughter to Laertes, Redgrave cried with joy and kissed everyone, as members of the cast crowded into his dressing room bearing flowers. He rang up the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have to deal with the country and its people so cruelly and arbitrarily . . . To call Nikolaev a coward! He went willingly to his death for what he believed in, he was better than all those so-called leaders of the working class put together.’ By the time she was 17, Nina’s long depression was lifting, she had some friends and a bit of a social life, she ...”

“... fail. Try crying. ‘Men will be moved and women unspeakably flattered.’ In any case, ‘being a coward is often the best way to save your life.’ Don’t give up hope prematurely: ‘If you’re in the wrong, you still have a chance to win litigation. Even the likes of you.’ When you’re in a real jam, ‘go abroad since fewer obligations can be imposed ...”

“... German surface raids on convoys. Hitler, who once said, ‘On land I am a hero but at sea I am a coward,’ withdrew all his large surface ships to home waters. To find, and to fight them again, Sheffield, as part of the Home Fleet, had to sail to Arctic and Norwegian waters.In retrospect, after such actions, junior naval officers always award marks to their ...”

“... from his mother’s side, he has inherited a fertile imagination and a refined intellect. He is no coward, but he fears that his conscience, like Hamlet’s, might make him overthink, crippling his ability to focus on fighting and killing. He resigns his commission rather than go to Egypt because he is convinced that hesitation of this sort will make him the ...”

“... who spilled coffee on her best Moroccan slippers, an ex-boyfriend who broke into her flat, ‘the coward’, ‘the German man’). Yet she returns again and again to scenes with Xavier: their conversations and impasses, his obtuseness, his tenderness, his maddening yet endearing quiddity. Her ‘previous publisher’ sends on (via email) a letter from her ...”

“... of being 11 years old in 1943. Too young to fight in the Resistance, old enough to feel like a coward, he is driven by historical anguish and self-loathing to a fatal hobby: the construction of an all-subsuming meta-conspiracy theory that involves everyone from the Knights Templar to the Cathars to the Third Reich to the Okhrana in a quest for subterranean ...”

“... not a single corner where I could preserve the feeling I was innocent. I recognised I was the coward, the traitor, the thief, the faggot that they saw in me ... I became abject. Slowly I grew accustomed to this condition. I admitted it with tranquillity. The scorn people felt for me changed into hatred: I’d succeeded. And yet what agonies I’d ...”

“... It is the source of Fascism’s charm as much as of the film star’s glamour, giving ‘to the coward now his hour of power’. In the Westland lunatic asylum, everything the broadcast voice of the Leader promises is given a positive charge by the prefix ‘Westland’. In the Nineveh hotel, a singer gives a positive value to every noun by prefixing the ...”

“... own good, but retired from his attacking position (sometimes ungracefully, so that he was called coward) when dangerous mutiny seemed likely. He was such a good friend to the public that we wonder whether he had any private friends, any private life. George Spater quotes from some notes made by Cobbett’s son, James, who was projecting a biography but found ...”

“... Eden as a lightweight either because of his mannerisms – the ‘My Dear’ which echoed Noel Coward and annoyed Dean Acheson – or because of the striking good looks which prompted jealous Italian journalists to dub him ‘Lord Eyelashes’. But everyone to some extent reflects the social usages of his time and place, and if it is true that most ...”

“... as saying that Gielgud’s production of The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic ‘made Maugham and Coward seem like two Nonconformist parsons from the Midlands’. It must have been an exciting time to be in the theatre and some of Wardle’s best pages are about the early days of Motley. They had taken as a studio Chippendale’s old workshop behind St ...”