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“... 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 ...”

“... yella,’ was the way he used to describe the young senator, meaning not that he was a coward (like all the Kennedys, JFK was physically absurdly brave) but that he was jaundiced and gaunt. As it turned out, the ‘yella’ Kennedy looked golden on TV. But Johnson must have suspected that Kennedy’s health would break down over the next eight ...”

“... her audience share that vision. And she was not alone: Peggy Ashcroft came from Croydon, Noël Coward from the suburbs and Alec Guinness was the son of a barmaid. But all of them had some sense of their proper position in life, a fantasy of what they wanted to be which these days would probably be disapproved of or discouraged, fantasy frowned on as some ...”

“... on a concrete platform like the bridge of a giant destroyer (In Which We Serve, with me as Noel Coward) to watch the procession of bin lorries that swept into the bays to drop off their rubbish. Outside, I could see two huge ash-heaps, the latest cinders of the 24-hour fires, and beyond them the high flats of Enfield, and I wondered whether an examination ...”

“... the phrase ‘jet set’ was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air travel was ...”