“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have learned only five Greek words, in order to say: “Shut up, fat girl” and “Shut up, fat boy.”’ He also ...”

“... go firmly to the window and listen with deep emotion, but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward; listen – your final pleasure – to the voices, to the exquisite music of that strange procession, and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing. What heightens the effect of these stunning lines is that Cavafy imposes a strict, perhaps even ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... episode in which even a most elegant upper-class crony is shown in the war trilogy to be a coward under fire. In Brideshead Revisited he romanticised the Flyte family – though, it is worth pointing out, none of the individual Flytes. But he does not ask himself why he is dazzled by them. Pansy Lamb told Waugh that when she looked back on her ...”

“... per cent up,’ he instructed a mutual acquaintance in 1915. He had decided that Gibson was ‘a coward’ and ‘the worst snob I met in England’. Walter de la Mare’s failure to write to him about a visit to the US in 1916 was inexcusable: ‘I have been in no mood to meet de la Mare. He is one of the open questions with me like what to do with ...”