“... to the music hall. Debunking the Victorian or fuddy-duddy in a flip tone, however, is more Coward or Waugh than Pooter. (In later years she would look back and ‘wriggle’ at her facetiousness.) She is not always high-spirited. Her diary is also a commonplace book where she transcribes passages from authors whose wisdom inspires her – the popular ...”

“... rarely appeared in the office and never visited the oilfields. He was arrogant, incompetent and a coward. I asked several of the interviewees about the theft of trucks by the employee and got a story very different from the one given by the country manager. They told me that in the middle of the fighting, the employee, rather than let the assets of a company ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the context of a heroic poem quite strong stuff: ‘dog-face’, ‘people-devouring king’, ‘coward’. A mixture of holy oaths and rather more explicit bodily language is widespread in ancient comedy. At the start of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata the women solemnly swear (over a wine flagon) to abstain from sex until their men make peace. The Spartan woman ...”

“... her husband, but it places no shade on her own affection. Michael had an intense affair with Noël Coward during the war. ‘Noël said that he hadn’t wished to hurt me,’ Rachel wrote years later, ‘and that it was no use having regrets about what you have done, but he had found Michael so irresistibly charming. I couldn’t but agree with him.’ To some ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the pacifist mother whose pathological attachment to her son was turning him into an emasculated coward, thus hastening moral disintegration and heading the nation into ruin’. The second edition of Wylie’s Generation of Vipers was published at the height of McCarthyism, and described motherhood and Communism as similarly dangerous forces. The spotlight ...”

“... puts it, ‘Falstaff is more than just the good man ... he is a drunk, a liar, a braggart, a coward, a bad influence and a thoroughgoing failure ... Falstaff was the Welles who owed money all over the world, who had abandoned and exploited associates, who had lied, tricked and feasted away the years.’ In other words, he was a mess; like Welles ...”

“... of Ring Lardner’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. Small wonder that writers from Robert Graves to Noel Coward to Isaiah Berlin have been inflated to fill up gaps. It is the greatest of Douglas’s posthumous misfortunes that his brilliant inward-looking talents, so suited to a time obsessed by inward identities, should have guaranteed him a place as one of its ...”

“... are also invited to despise Penelope’s chief suitor, Antinous (‘opposite mind’), for being a coward, a liar and a schemer. The film asks us both to be horrified at war and to celebrate the action-movie sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally gets his hands on his bow and the blood starts flowing. The massacre of the suitors is probably the most ...”

“... every capacity for affection. But one doesn’t choose one’s destiny. One submits to it. I was a coward in my youth. I was afraid of Life. Ultimately, all accounts are rendered. ‘Je m’oursifie,’ I am turning into a bear, Flaubert wrote to Feydeau in 1861, and the image has stuck. But this was a bear made bearish by having a very thin skin. Sand soon ...”

“... member of a local population who thinks its influence a good thing for his country is a fool, a coward or a traitor. But there is a very different way of looking at the role Kouchner has played in the spread of US hegemony. Very few of the people described in their own countries as ‘lackeys’ and ‘poodles’ of the US new world order appear that way to ...”