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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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who is coming to be seen as a coward and a failure: Suddenly, though, the past was being counted as nothing, like rescinded currency.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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was an awful woman called Gallery Nell, who would go to a first night and if it wasn’t by Noel Coward she’d start the most terrifying booing going. AH: Was she thrown out? FW: No, no. The play would stagger on for another night, when I would be there reviewing it. Gallery Nell would still be there booing it, and then it would come off, and as I was ...”

“... to its dancefloor, where everybody was doing the Twist. Tennessee Williams, Merle Oberon and Noël Coward were regulars. Norman Mailer did the Twist with Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter. High society enjoyed slumming it, and the socialites, sailors and salesmen sweated it out together in the noisy gloom, posing, cruising, ogling. Press fascination with the ...”

“... is, I suppose, possible to sympathise with the view of historians such as Woolrych and Barry Coward that the Protectorate really didn’t do too badly:Taken as a body, the Cromwellian ordinances give little support to the stereotype of puritan repression, and convey an impression of sensible, unbiased effort to apply practical correctives to perceived ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Democrats still choke over the slick media campaign that soon transformed John Kerry into a coward and traitor who should have his war medals stripped from him and then – right-wing radio made this their favourite cause – be tried for treason. Democrats admired a war hero who came home and criticised the war; Republicans despised him for it. The ...”

“... about to open. ‘Terribly Terribly Flat Cambridge Beware Too Much Local Colour All Success=Noel Coward.’ Hugh was moved to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on 4 May, now that he was out of danger of a second stroke; only the pneumonia remained. On Friday morning, to everyone’s amazement, he was in the stroke ward’s gym with two ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... advised him to see a doctor about his problem – the drinking, that is, not the cottaging. Noël Coward wrote Gielgud a gratefully acknowledged letter of support, but in his diary fulminated about a ‘day of horror’: ‘This imbecile behaviour of John’s has let us all down with a crash.’ It might have been all right, might even have helped the case ...”