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“... Chatwin’s other models look very odd in the juxtaposing: he admired Hemingway and doted on Noël Coward. Clapp’s attempt to make sense of this is as forlorn as anyone’s would be: Coward’s ‘measured languour and tense, comic under-statement can be discerned in Chatwin’s prose, as, occasionally, can Hemingway’s ...”

“... of the Spanish adventure. So there are no sodomites in Greene’s account, and the only coward, crank and sap-headed dilettante is John Sterling, the would-be mastermind of the whole affair. Charismatic, feckless and volatile, Sterling had dropped out of Cambridge, and by 1827, when he was 21, drifted to London, where he was dabbling in journalism ...”

“... the shape of my brain-pan.’ His professionalism shows through, and it is clear that the Noël Coward biography which he had just started at the time of his death would have been something to have looked forward to from a man who could describe Elsa Maxwell as ‘an ugly, vulgar, fusty, noisy woman with a tumbler of whisky screwed into her knotty ...”

“... the holocaust, and afterwards mayor of St Laurent-le-Nouveau: not exactly a trimmer, not exactly a coward. Margaret Forster’s Mother Can You Hear Me? is well-titled and the answer is no. To my knowledge, there is no official Daughter’s Day yet, but this book is one long high-pitched celebration of the situation of daughter misunderstood by mother. There ...”

“... in production with Ralph Fiennes as the director. The joke seems crude – Gene Autry meets Noël Coward, say – but the tone here, as in the rest of the film, has those curious qualities the Coen brothers specialise in. Everything is slow, a little obvious, and whatever is funny is caught up in another effect, harder to name. In this case we can’t play ...”

“... himself an extra beer, which he drank at the bar. The truth was that he was a bigmouth liar, a coward, a virgin, a spotty nineteen year old who tried to make out he was a hard man but didn’t have the guts to fight: a gawky streak of wind and water, feeble when sober, slobbering after a few beers. He lived in a dream world where he was bigtime. If he saw ...”

“... comes from reimagining the human form. The characters are themselves abstract – Enemy, Coward, Traveller – and Malevich correspondingly made costumes whose shapes and blocks of colour are more like the expression of internal traits than clothes. The Pallbearer’s torso is simply a black square, a pitiless nothing. Given the abstraction that was ...”

“... The young Noel Coward thought E. Nesbit was ‘the most genuine Bohemian I had ever seen’. Berta Ruck called her ‘the Duchess’. Nesbit set herself up as the complete Edwardian: a free-thinker, a matriarch and a madcap. She bobbed her hair, carried her tobacco in a corset box, and acquiesced in her Fabian husband’s disdain for the suffragettes: ‘Votes for women ...”

“... 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 latest ...”

“... and July covers the whole career, which seems to fall into what we might call shifts. The Noël Coward shift comprises In Which We Serve (1942), This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945) and Brief Encounter; the Dickens shift is Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist; and the epic shift consists of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of ...”

“... Auden and Chester Kallman, Graham Greene, Allen Tate, Louis MacNeiec, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, John Braine, Mary McCarthy ... (a shade slyly, Mrs Spark, after all a director in her own way, may here be self-indulgently thinking of some of her own old pals). He meditates the great turn of the times that may be upon us, and dreads God’s dreams ...”

“... in the squares of wartime London, in the constant literary references which view Noël Coward, Ivor Novello and Robert Newton in the light of Garrick’s theatrical world, or his pungent romance with Miss Julia set against Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris. It is not just a world of politesse and enlightenment that is referred to. Boswell (who provides the ...”

“... not a diplomat but an engine-driver; another man learns that his father was not a war hero but a coward and a traitor. An early story, ‘The Son’, begins with an adoptive father declaring it a ‘shameful thing for a man to live 35 years not knowing that his parents are not his parents at all’: his son’s discovery will, naturally, be the story’s ...”

“... had? Either I was going to become a Kapo in short trousers, the paradigmatic combination of bully, coward and traitor; or I would have had to speak up and face the consequences (or, conceivably but improbably, shame the gang into remorse). Manifestations of this kind of low-level racism were by no means confined to anti-Semitism. The boys’ books and ...”

“... makes cowboys of us all,” ’ and that the Sphere is allowed to bend another ‘coward’ proverb upon Noel Coward. Aldous Huxley (‘When Greek meets Greek ...’) here speaks of ‘the tug of bores’; and G.K. Chesterton, more searchingly, insists that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing ...”