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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Freddy grows proficient in alien dialects, like the nob-English of officers ‘who didn’t mean a coward when they said cocktail’. (Later Murray renders Swiss-German as Scots: ‘Yon Hitler’s a coof.’) For all his activity, Freddy seems deeper and easier to get to know than most of the characters in other poems and novels wholly given to ...”

“... his book their authority. He is capable of Victorian candour – he calls Marcuse a ‘miserable coward’, which is almost what Stephen called Jowett – and he can be pretty hard on Leslie’s shortcomings. Yet there is also a tenderness, and a willingness to defend his man from unjust strictures. One sees this in his remarks about Stephen’s ...”

“... a wife, Elfriede, who was the worst kind of German academic prig. He was also a tremendous moral coward, as his behaviour both in the Nazi era and in the subsequent occupation showed. But it is difficult not to regard Hannah Arendt’s subsequent work as one long showing-off to Heidegger. Even in the Sixties, when she ran into a graphologist in New York, she ...”

“... In London they had little suppers in restaurants and saw Charlie Chaplin in Shoulder arms and Noel Coward in Hay Fever. To Cockerell it seemed that she was subsisting on tea and cigarettes, since Charlotte, like most women living on a fixed income, had the illusion of being much poorer than she really was. In 1924 he arranged a Civil List pension for her of ...”

“... work got worse as the life became more absurd or tragic. Living life to the full and never being a coward like his father took its toll in all those accidents and fights. The legend spoilt things for him. When he went back to Pamplona for the bullfights he found the place ruined by tourists, sent there by his books. He himself was the main tourist attraction ...”

“... Tolstoy’s service was not like that, for though the diarist often accuses himself of being a coward, he behaved bravely enough on the few occasions when he was in actual danger. Like Hemingway, though, he was both obsessed with the need for a macho image and at the same time privately disgusted with the need and the idea. War and Peace is far more frank ...”

“... the guardians of ideological soundness never forgave Strauss. He was labelled a cynic and a coward for his next opera, Der Rosenkavalier. Elektra had almost been split apart by its stylistic contradictions: the sense of compositional stress in the more daring music of that opera adds to its derangement, but the queasy eruption of music from the Vienna ...”

“... Beauvoir’s speculation in ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ (1955) that he was bound to have been a coward, he fought with distinction against the Prussians in the Seven Years War. His superior officer’s laconic report reads: ‘Totally deranged, very brave.’ Once back home Sade was married off to an intelligent and agreeable woman whose family appealed to ...”