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“... My great new friend is Noël Coward’, Nancy Mitford confided to a correspondent in 1949. ‘Bliss. He shakes like a jelly at one’s jokes, I adore that.’ It was laughs Nancy Mitford wanted, much more than grandeur. She longs to make people laugh, and sometimes, almost in the manner of a nervous stand-up comedienne, interrupts her letters to make sure that the audience is suitably convulsed ...”

“... had she arrived than his Bond persona took fright, and he determined to palm her off on Noel Coward, who lived up the bay. In exchange Coward asked for the gift of Fleming’s polaroid camera and tripod, which he had long coveted, and the pair haggled openly over the deal in the presence of the novelist, who had no ...”

“... this century. He has never, however, been an innovator, like his friends Alfred Hitchcock and Noel Coward; he has helped-creative talent to flourish, but always as a promoter, a showman. It was his idea to hang a picture of P. T. Barnum in every office in Granada Television. He is arguably the most successful of the television barons. Lord Bernstein himself ...”

“... chap who has never cared to obey’, and he ‘would object, and would then be despised as a coward even by his former friends’. And what better way to get used to following orders than by becoming a scout? Besides the uplifting anecdotes of heroic patriotism, Scouting for Boys is packed with advice about how to find north without a compass, tie a ...”

“... And in Bangkok at 12 o’clock? It needs an effort of imagination to think of Noel Coward reading The Golden Bough (popular abridged edition, 1922), but he catches perfectly the scatter-effect of Late Victorian and Edwardian anthopology practised according to the comparative method, above all by Frazer, from whose legendary notebooks the ...”

“... his support and felt that he would be a good person to have beside them in a coup – he was no coward. But he was a dangerously indiscreet conspirator at the planning stages. His friends all said so and he was never taken into anyone’s confidence. The military coup so long anticipated took place on 14 December 1825. Pushkin was at that time at ...”

“... tone: ‘Is that really worth the read?’ I said that, surprisingly, it was, but added, like a coward, that I hadn’t paid for the book. ‘Nothing wrong with a bit of gossip,’ she said. ‘As long as it’s harmless.’ Over the last decade or so, the monarchy has been thought to be in danger on a number of occasions: the events that constituted the ...”

“... There is much about the succession of lovers or near-lovers – Gabriel Atkin, Ivor Novello, Noël Coward, Rex Whistler and above all the unbearable Stephen Tennant with his pearls and tantrums – but these tortuous episodes, in which Sassoon often gave as much hell as he got, are greatly revealing of his dissatisfaction as well as evocative of the ...”

“... then top dollar for his concessions. (Although Lenzner’s informants say that he was a physical coward – vide Mencken – he was certainly no coward as an investor.) In 1953 his first Mideast well came in; in 1957 Fortune proclaimed him the richest American. In context, the fact that he was in trouble with the American ...”

“... on the platform instead of swinging from one chandelier to another ... He’s a miserable little coward and the best way of dealing with a bloody fucker like him is to get hold of him personally and give him a good beating which he won’t forget.’ This attack on Lord Beaverbrook, which must have sent a frisson of delighted horror through its ...”

“... He was a mixture of Pan and Peter Pan. Clive Fisher, who has written a very good book on Noel Coward, was quite right to give this elegant study the subtitle ‘A Nostalgic Life’. Being Anglo-Irish helped the nostalgia. Connolly senior had been a Major in the British Army and when he retired became an expert conchologist – shells to shells, as one ...”

“... up to my knees in Protestant blood’ to achieve a united Ireland. He is a physical and moral coward, ‘aloof’, a poseur, who for all his ‘studied image as a man of letters and an intellectual’, has a second-rate brain. He is treacherous – the authors hint that he even set a rival up for assassination. Sources quoted in Man of War, Man of ...”

“... A-team of translators – Bellos and Whiteside and Schwartz, Anthea Bell, Linda Coverdale, David Coward, Howard Curtis, William Hobson, Sian Reynolds, David Watson – but, or and, one of the remarkable features of the project is how consistent the tone is across the books. When you look at the range of tones and voices in the same publisher’s ...”

“... present when an unprepossessing, arrogant (and straight) young show-off was introduced to Noël Coward with an aria of praise ending in the proclamation: ‘He is a genius!’ Coward looked him up and down, observing as he turned away: ‘He’d better be.’ Tracking Spike Milligan through his 67 years, we register in ...”

“... had never in his life done anything to live down the Greek Street sobriquet ‘flabby-faced old coward’. He himself was vaguely present, moving about the carpet like a terrible tortoise. A sprinkling of hacks and politicos completed the scene, which was identical to a score of similar gatherings except in point of its grand setting. And then there was a ...”