“... 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 ...”

“... arresting phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some renovated pagan sense tiresome and ...”

“... to stay [and face the trial]. We could not have been together. I did not want to be called a coward or a deserter. A false name, a disguise, a hunted life, all that is not for me, to whom you have been revealed on that high hill where beautiful things are transfigured. O sweetest of all boys, most loved of all loves, my soul clings to your soul, my life ...”

“... enough in itself, the multiplication yields no cogent physical image: Rogier Van der Weyden, Noël Coward, Rubens, Delacroix, Goya cancel one another out. Can the sequence be justified as the impress on the narrator’s perceptions of someone essentially elusive, across successive conflicting emotions and the passage of time? Perhaps. But the indeterminacy ...”

“... in childhood’; ‘a chainless soul’; ‘to walk invisible’; ‘give me liberty!’; ‘no coward soul is mine’. Our characters are well established and ready to begin their adventures.There are​ far too many books about the Brontës, and books about books about the Brontës, for us to be able to track and arrange our knowledge exhaustively, to ...”

“... day. Police and security men were jostling locals and holding them back as her car arrived. ‘Coward!’ Joe Delaney, a resident, shouted. ‘Go home!’ someone else shouted. ‘Murdering scum!’That evening, not long after his office was trashed, Paget-Brown received a call at home from the prime minister. She told him she had just been to the Clement ...”