“... to his demands without payment and does to her exactly what he saw the Victor doing. Addict, liar, coward, abuser of women, abuser of office, faithless husband, feckless lover, war criminal, corrupt cop: it is at this point that we realise Peace may not be going to offer his central character redemption. In fact, he offers him less than that. Inspector Minami ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a characterisation of another warrior, the good bad pilot Abbott, who is coming to be seen as a coward and a failure: Suddenly, though, the past was being counted as nothing, like rescinded currency. What he had had for so long, what he had grown old in possession of, was gone now, sickeningly, and there was nothing else of importance to him, as with men ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of a man younger still, Henry Fleming, who worries that in the test of war he will prove a coward, and then does. Some rough germ of an idea for the novel had been with Crane for years. As a child he fantasised about war and in his teens he contemplated West Point and a military career. In college while watching a football game he felt he was watching ...”

“... with the same enthusiasm as he had been praised: he was a corrupt placeman, a party hack, a coward and a stick-in-the-mud, a reactionary mystagogue, his speeches and writings irredeemably tainted by his personal corruption and his superstitiousness. In his quirky but compelling book on Burke, The Great Melody, Conor Cruise O’Brien fingers James Mill ...”

“... her performance of ‘Let’s Do It’ at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in Lancaster at the avocado counter. Her Dinnerladies was often sentimental, but she caught in the part of the handyman, played by Duncan Preston, the idiom of an old-fashioned ...”

“... presents, a silk dressing-gown (‘I’m wearing it to show that I am quite happy to direct Noël Coward if asked’). A wheelchair has been provided for a 90-year-old guest who hasn’t turned up, so Lindsay commandeers it and is wheeled around the room getting older by the minute. Full of all sorts of people, with showbusiness probably in a minority, and ...”

“... read and questioned, and I quote, ‘Althusser, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Balibar, Hadjinicolau, Coward, Ellis, Tagg, Burgin, Griselda Pollock, Kelly, Screen Education or Tel Quel’, and constructed a materialist counter-humanism which saved, or at least guarded, the legitimacy of common-sense language. We had both been invited to give papers at a ...”