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... 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 ...

Brecht’s New Age

Margot Heinemann, 1 March 1984

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches 
by John Willett.
Methuen, 274 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 413 50410 7
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Brecht: A Biography 
by Ronald Hayman.
Weidenfeld, 423 pp., £18.50, September 1983, 0 297 78198 7
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... 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 ...

House-Cleaning

David Bromwich: I met a Republican, 7 March 2019

... 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 ...

A Lethal Fall

Barbara Everett: Larkin and Chandler, 11 May 2006

... 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 ...

The Original Targets

James Meek: The Birth of al-Qaida, 8 February 2007

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida’s Road to 9/11 
by Lawrence Wright.
Allen Lane, 470 pp., £25, August 2006, 9780713999730
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... 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 ...

Knife at the Throat

T.J. Clark: Fanon’s Contradictions, 26 September 2024

The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon 
by Adam Shatz.
Apollo, 464 pp., £25, January, 978 1 0359 0004 6
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... 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 ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... 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 ...

In His Pink Negligée

Colm Tóibín: The Ruthless Truman Capote, 21 April 2005

The Complete Stories 
by Truman Capote.
Random House, 400 pp., $24.95, September 2004, 0 679 64310 9
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Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote 
edited by Gerald Clarke.
Random House, 487 pp., $27.95, September 2004, 0 375 50133 9
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... 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 ...

Thoughts on Late Style

Edward Said, 5 August 2004

... 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 ...

Rejoicings in a Dug-Out

Peter Howarth: Cecil, Ada and G.K., 15 December 2022

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton 
by Richard Ingrams.
Harbour, 292 pp., £20, August 2021, 978 1 905128 33 4
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... 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 ...

Her Man

Ahdaf Soueif, 21 August 1980

... of the wind and scared of the dark and scared to sleep on her own on the roof. What a coward. How come you’re not scared of the man? Or doesn’t that,’ wiggling the middle finger of her right hand in the girl’s face in an obscene gesture, ‘scare you?’ ‘Stop it Hekmat,’ said the grandmother. ‘Leave the girl alone.’ She looked ...

It is still mañana

Matthew Bevis: Robert Frost’s Letters, 19 February 2015

The Letters of Robert Frost, Vol. 1: 1886-1920 
edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen.
Harvard, 811 pp., £33.95, March 2014, 978 0 674 05760 9
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... the letters, he appears to be searching for ways to be afraid that won’t make him feel like a coward. In his introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson’s King Jasper, he quotes a couplet from Robinson’s ‘Flammonde’ – ‘One pauses half afraid/To say for certain that he played’ – and adds: his much-admired restraint lies wholly in his never ...

Diary

Jonathan Steele: In Syria, 22 March 2012

... belongs to a regime family: her father is a senior Baath Party member. She says he’s a coward. One of her friends is a relative of Assad’s wife, Asma. At a recent protest in a Damascus suburb they took refuge in a shop when the army started shooting. The owner pulled down the metal shutters but was forced to open them when troops threatened to ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John Clements), fears he is a coward and having declined to go with his regiment to the Sudan goes native in order to prove himself by working unrecognised to assist his ex-colleagues who have sent him the feathers. To corroborate his disguise as a harmless native he has himself branded, the ...

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