“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dying Cuchulain has found a group of cowards as associates. The word ‘linen’ and the word ‘coward’ seem irresolute in a poem where many words appear to be certain. Cuchulain’s certainty gives way to something that has previously been anathema to him.In this poem, the warrior Cuchulain is, among other things, a shadow version of Yeats himself, or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”