“... 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 ...”

“... both aficionados of Hollywood musicals, could be heard breaking into duets of Cole Porter or Noël Coward – Meriel in tune, Francis undoubtedly faultless with the lyrics. At six o’clock a half-bottle of Teachers would be purchased for ‘pre-drink drinks’ – a deadline gradually pulled forward to 5.30. You would hear, at moments, hysterical laughter. He ...”

“... is an author, seen correcting proofs and handing out copies of his new book: but he is also a coward and a masochist, the author of a systematic treatise on the many different ways one can accept physical abuse – a kind of Kama Sutra of abasement. One of the most popular characters in Middleton’s A Game at Chess is the Fat Bishop, a ...”

“... very fine athlete, was the one person who was generally thought to have behaved like a shit and a coward. The boat he was in was one of the emptiest, yet its crew alleged that he had not only refused to go back but had later tried to buy their silence. The couple appeared at their own request before the British inquiry, where Sir Cosmo said in his defence ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... most dreads. ‘You know?’ she asks him. ‘Something I didn’t kind of see you as? You’re a coward.’ There is a political point, as well as an emotional one, in Raban’s use of a defective quest as the literary form for his ‘American Voyage’. The epic stories of the American frontier are still honoured there as exemplary tales, but they have ...”

“... says approvingly: Now that is the heart of Högni the brave, Not like the heart of Hjalli the coward. Little does it quake as it lies on the plate. It quaked still less when it lay in his breast. He does this, of course, so that he can laugh at his tormentors, secure in the knowledge that he is even less likely to talk than his brother was. And the whole ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were published separately, Verne conceived of them as a single unit. This new translation by David Coward and William Butcher, with an introduction and extensive notes by Butcher, brings both novels together under the title Journey to the Moon. Like many in Europe, Verne was fascinated by the progress of the American Civil War, and especially by the new kinds ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... charge the poet had been a CIA agent had been fabricated by Rivas Mira, but described Dalton as a coward and a Cuban agent, and attacked the ‘inconsequential and parasitic petty bourgeois left-wing intellectuals’ who converted him into a ‘hero when the truth is that he was a victim and the author of his own death’. Under Villalobos, the ERP did its ...”

“... In​ 1974, aged 71, having announced the end of a writing career that had produced nearly two hundred novels, and having retreated from a mansion with 11 servants to a small house in Lausanne where he lived with his second wife’s ex-maid, Georges Simenon dictated his Letter to My Mother, Henriette Simenon née Brüll, who had died four years earlier ...”