“... which there was nothing to be done except complain. Accused of drinking champagne at breakfast, Noël Coward asked: ‘Doesn’t everybody?’ Accused of committing a form of national suicide, the British in the Sixties and Seventies merely raised their eyebrows, as if this was the way of the industrialised world. Wasn’t everybody? Sir Denis Barnes ...”

“... desks. Singapore’s climate is even more extraordinary than it appears to have been when Noel Coward was putting up at Raffles Hotel. The Master remarked of a downpour: ‘I recognised it as rain only because I knew it couldn’t possibly be anything else.’ Ah, Singapore! How hard it is to stay the pen from scribbling the ‘colony’, if only by way of ...”

“... of the middle class whom he met over gaming tables and in clubs. He became friendly with Noel Coward, Ivor Novello and Marlene Dietrich, as well as with Terence Young, who later made the first Bond films. Mixing with these types made Chapman acutely aware of his own lack of education, and he read enthusiastically, trying to catch up. Macintyre is often ...”

“... to Male Sensitivity’. Women get it, gays get it (though Sinatra’s pack liked to have a Noel Coward around ‘to talk to the women’), Jews get it (‘Not that Mr S. was anti-semitic; he simply felt most comfortable with guys from the same background’) and, strangest of all, given that Mr J. is a black man, black people get it non-stop, as if it were ...”

“... full panoply of the country house as home, with its limited diversions and heavy obligations. As Noël Coward put it, ‘The fact that they have to be rebuilt/and frequently mortgaged to the hilt/is inclined to take the gilt/off the gingerbread.’ Coward himself, who was born in Waldegrave ...”

“... inventing what then gets reclassified, post facto, as gay male culture (Terry Castle’s Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits analyses this phenomenon). Leider mentions that Nazimova tweezed Valentino’s eyebrows and ‘applied blue-black shadow to his eyelids and obvious lipstick to his lips’, while Natacha ‘had him shampoo away the ...”

“... a person of ‘the highest respectability’ no penalty was sought. No such allowance was made for Noël Coward (fined for a currency lapse) or for Ivor Novello (jailed under petrol regulations for misuse of his Rolls-Royce). An offence which carried the death penalty – and there were placards proclaiming this threat – was looting from blitzed ...”

“... charts Osborne’s transformation from the Angry Young Man of the late 1950s via ‘the faux Coward sophisticate and surly teddy boy’ of the 1960s to the English country squire of the 1980s and 1990s. People who knew Osborne personally (which I didn’t) speak warmly of the quality of his company; however, most also acknowledge that his refusal to edit ...”

“... and often depressed old age. In 1962, two years before her death, one of her oldest enemies, Noël Coward, endeavoured a rapprochement. They had not been on speaking terms since 1923, when Coward had very publicly walked out of the first performance of Façade. He now wrote her a letter congratulating her on her ...”

“... in a prominent grazing family. His mother, the imperial Ruth, could have been scripted by Noel Coward. Attaining widowhood, she left to spend her last quarter-century in the London which had always been the Mecca of her late-colonial class; until then, from World War One to 1937, she was a leader of Sydney society, dabbling in galleries and little ...”

“... addicted to Victorian novels. Yet when he is making love-talk it is sometimes remarkably like Noel Coward on stage with Gertie Lawrence. On the whole, though, the English language is not over-inflected with status symbols – not even a du or a tu. Pam’s husband wants his elder brothers to call him ‘Mister Hargreaves’, when they are painting his ...”

“... And intellectual proclivities. At speaking English he is Leslie Howard: At playing the piano, Noel Coward. There’s consolation in a fairy-tale, But none when Lech Walesa is released – Surely the final proof that he must fail. In back rooms as a species of lay priest He might say mass but only in a pale Reflection of that sacrificial feast When Poland at ...”

“... in Singapore. Even Wodehouse became an American citizen, almost as bizarre a transition as Noël Coward becoming Nigerian. So did Christopher Isherwood, on whom there is an uninspired contribution from Katherine Bucknell. Wendy Lesser remarks on what she sees as Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncanny ability to re-create alien cultures. In his ...”

“... at Cecconi’s’ and ‘Farewell Performance’. Imagine Cavalcanti crossed with Noel Coward, for Merrill slips easily from sybilline utterance into silkiest nonsense. He was hissed at a literary festival on ‘regional poetry’ in northern Minnesota when he expressed his disdain of the local product. As he scurried out, he whispered to Richard ...”

“... Dulcie Piper who lives in a ramshackle house above Robin Hood’s Bay. Dulcie is friends with Noël Coward and knows about wine, literature and the names of plants. Over the course of a long summer she introduces Robert to good food and the writing of D.H. Lawrence, and makes mawkish statements like ‘books are just paper, but they contain within ...”