“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hard and loose.’ Rock vocalists weren’t meant to sound like this – more Noël Coward or Edith Sitwell than the usual refried mush of American blues and soul. ‘I would do anything for you,’ a stricken Ferry sings on ‘If There Is Something’. ‘I would put roses round our door/Sit in the garden/Growing potatoes by the score.’ (This ...”

“... are here – Bob Dylan, the Stones, Phil Spector – but also the Duchess of Windsor, Noël Coward, Peter Stringfellow, Malcolm Sargent, Beryl Bainbridge, John Birt, Jonathan Aitken, Edward Heath et al. This isn’t just a confetti of toe-curling names. Brown catches a moment when discrete segments of society were slowly coalescing into an entity called ...”

“... as a ‘comprehensive indecision’. Turgenev was harder on himself. He ‘insisted that he was a coward’, a friend reported in 1881, ‘and that he had not got a pennyworth of will’.A liberal and convinced ‘Westerner’, for most of his adult life Turgenev visited Russia only at intervals. Accounting for his decision to go to university in Berlin in ...”

“... diabolical, malevolent mischief-maker’ who lived in ‘a cesspit’, he was also a coward. ‘The last and biggest crime of all of Ward’s in the eyes of decent men was that at the pinch – he just couldn’t take it.’ The press, though, were being given a lead by the lawyers. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, in his closing address for the ...”

“... see what was there. But the people one had to contend with were in this world, I insisted. I was a coward. Some of them I minded very much. This led on to the subject of friendship and here we did not understand each other quite so well. He seemed self-contradictory, for here he was, showing such friendliness to me, yet he lived, I felt, and so I said, in a ...”

“... others likeable, yet others (the majority) just ridiculous . . . He is vain and conceited. He is a coward. He loves nature deeply. And he forgets the German language. So ends the first part of Interesting Times. From a literary point of view, it could well have stopped there. We would then have had something close to those masterpieces of calm ...”

“... have felt better about myself if I’d protested. As it is I come out feeling both cheated and a coward.12 September. Labouring along Gloucester Avenue on my bike I see run across the road and just miss a car, a moorhen. It’s a fair hop from the canal where I imagine it’s come from, and had I not been on the bike I’d have stopped to see where it was ...”

“... presidential primaries in 2016, Cruz had called Trump a ‘pathological liar’, a ‘snivelling coward’ and ‘utterly immoral’ after Trump had claimed that Cruz’s father was directly involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and repeatedly commented that Cruz’s wife was much uglier than Melania, even posting comparative photos of the ...”

“... covered his tracks, and never drew recognisable conclusions. He seems to have been something of a coward. The nearest he comes to a conclusion is tucked away, characteristically, towards the end (p. 419 ff.) of the penultimate volume of Foundations, where he discusses ‘the new Soviet society’. Here he has only a platitude to offer: ‘Seldom, perhaps, in ...”

“... bow … a poor defence … All you have done is to scratch the sole of my foot … a shot from a coward and a milksop does no harm. But my weapons [heavy throwing spears] have a better edge. One touch of them and a man is dead. The Iliad is an epic – the point is not to win but to gain honour by fighting not efficiently but heroically. Yet for all ...”

“... at his head. The rich man, who turns out to be the sheriff of Nottingham, becomes a snivelling coward, begging his attackers to take the money and spare his life. The strongbox is taken and forced open. Silver coins spill out. The outlaws are about to fill their pockets, but Robin wards them off: this money is for the poor. However abstract the Robin Hood ...”

“... Rothermere and his wife in the spring of 1949, Princess Margaret took the microphone from Noël Coward and tried to sing ‘Let’s Do It’, only to be greeted by ‘a prolonged and thunderous booing’ from one of the guests. Caroline Blackwood, ‘enthralled’ by the interruption, asked the man next to her who had caused it. ‘It was that dreadful ...”