“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and her goodness is unshakable. She will recognise Schabbach’s fanatical Nazi for what he is, a coward and a bully, and she will say so; she will see that Hitler’s new age of prosperity is a dangerous lie, and she will say that too. It is all borrowed money and borrowed time, and one day the debts will have to be paid. The Oma has three children, all born ...”

“... in the filth of our homelands and the terrifying emptiness of our minds. Every spectator is a coward and a traitor.’ Shatz shudders at the lines – he calls them eerie, but at the same time he knows they are boilerplate. He mentions Sartre’s Les Mains sales – required reading for Stalinists in the 1950s. He thinks inevitably of Lenin (one of the ...”

“... a combination of writer, actor, singer and self-producer he is more plausibly compared with Noel Coward than with any of the cabaret stars. But Humphries, along with the right to shock, claims the right to bore. The originals of his satirised characters bore him, and he takes his revenge by making their simulacra boring in turn. They go on until the audience ...”

“... most impartial of witnesses on the Brecht-Weigel relationship. Similarly, Brecht as a child was a coward and often a bully of younger boys – according (if you look it up) to his brother Walter, who a little later served as a volunteer in Von Epp’s Freikorps to crush the Munich Soviet. It may be true, but one would want better evidence than that. What we ...”

“... Bora in the spring of 1987, he and his Arabs scored a single victory. Not that bin Laden was a coward. He and his fighters were under mortar and napalm bombardment for weeks on end. There are different accounts of the final battle, which ended in local Soviet retreat, but bin Laden was close enough to the Russians for the bullets to whistle past and the ...”

“... interpenetrate, as enemies and functions of each other. The element of the meretricious (what Noel Coward called the potency of cheap music) may be the reason that Larkin loved and remembered books like Chandler’s. Unhappy with the claims and stances of Modernism, Larkin cherished arts that were composedly unpretentious. The culturally refined ...”

“... while giving pleasure to the anti-immigration alarmists who provoked it when they called Trump a coward. Democrats leaned heavily on the incivility of the government layoffs and suspension of pay, with considerable help from the mainstream media. This was a fair political signal to liberals, who think well of government workers, but it couldn’t appeal to ...”

“... could not look on Death, which being known,Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.(‘The Coward’)Yet, relatively speaking, very few men seem to have failed thus in their duty. Those who did so were usually blatantly shell-shocked or otherwise unfit. However amazing in retrospect, the vast majority of ordinary soldiers accepted the martial tasks ...”

“... Strange Drinks’ in the New Witness, taunting teetotallers with the lines ‘Cocoa is a cad and a coward/Cocoa is a vulgar beast,/Cocoa is a dull, disloyal/Lying crawling cad and clown.’ His real target was only too obvious, and Gardiner reluctantly sacked him. ‘My unaffected physical recoil from cocoa was not an attack on Mr Cadbury,’ Chesterton’s ...”