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“... 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 ...”

“... late and without a programme, he found himself asking who had written such a dull play (answer: Coward) and who could have directed such an ill-acted spectacle (answer: Olivier, and with Vivien Leigh in the cast). Both men laughed ruefully, and the friendship survived: Olivier’s years on the rack as Vivien’s husband were nearing their conclusion. To his ...”

“... reported to Jules Moch, cannot count as hard historical evidence. Nor was President Azaña just a coward: he can be considered one of the best writers ever to stray into politics. And so on. The author is a balanced man, but he betrays his own attitude once or twice as when he says that the Left’s revolution in Asturias was ‘a courageous failure’. It ...”

“... prankishness. His verbal wit, it is true, sometimes had a little more edge, in the Noël Coward style. I liked: ‘Complaining of insomnia, he said that he had had a room next door to Sibyl Colefax, “and she never stopped climbing all night”.’ Mark Amory’s entertaining book leaves one rather liking Berners, a most unpretentious man, but ...”

“... that Carter was just as much a liar, double-dealer, blowhard, serf of corporate power, and coward, as your average seeker after high office, and we hastened to publish the evidence. It made no difference, given the consensus on his non-badness, and I realised then that the ‘damaging story’ was a thing of the past, part of the discarded ...”

“... him dragoon his own scabs in the General Strike. Anyway, the Kelly story had a happy ending. Noel Coward was induced to make a movie about it – one of the great camp films of the wartime period. As Dame Janet gushes: Dickie could not have been more pleased. The script? Here were his own speeches to the crew. Problems with the Admiralty? He wheeled Noel in ...”

“... in the front line of one-man showmen, along with, say, Michael MacLiammoir, Ruth Draper and Noel Coward. Thus no modern writer can have taken more literally the injunction to ‘read out loud the sentence you have just written’ – except that Keillor has spoken not just an individual sentence or two but the whole story plus a raft of variations tried out ...”

“... contains no lees. In going through some reviews of Barnes’s earlier novels, I noticed that David Coward called Flaubert’s Parrot ‘a Modernist text with a 19th-century heart’. By contrast Malcolm Bradbury, in The Modern British Novel, claims that – with its game with notions of the real and the fictional, its making its own rules and its breaking up ...”

“... only dares to reveal his own by making unsuitable off-hand remarks in the mess (‘I’m a devout coward’). The novel is far too intelligent to take refuge in the self-protective attitudes with which Kingsley Amis and his friends guarded themselves by means of systematic derision from similar sorts of situation. No clowning around, no references to ...”

“... contemporary hit – from The Belle of New York, The Merry Widow, Hello Ragtime! or the early Noel Coward revues. Unable to read music, she played the piano by ear in an enjoyably slapdash way, and when she came to stay the house would be filled with the sound of these irresponsible melodies, which worked on one’s spirits like the concept of a cocktail. At ...”

“... wrote an ode to the penis’, or that Edith Sitwell took to her bed for six weeks after Noel Coward put her in a play as Hernia Whittlebot, or that Ibsen three times over a period of twenty years based characters on a ‘fellow poet, novelist and dramatist whose easy self-confidence’ contrasted with his own ‘sense of personal failure’, or that ...”

“... David Arkell calls his biography Looking for Laforgue and he has undoubtedly found him. Without attempting what is popularly labelled ‘official’ biography, Arkell’s informal portrait is so convincing that it is hard to see an official biography adding more than superfluous detail. He brings us close to the living temper of a poet who is still fairly unknown to English-speakers but who, through his impact on T ...”

“... was vital war work, and that he could hardly be expected to travel by train. At the time Noël Coward called this ‘selfish, pathetic triviality’, though he later fell foul of the regulations himself. So did Lady Astor, Lord Donegall and the army’s provost marshal, no less. It was a smart move by the authorities to target these figures. It was ...”

“... can be found speaking to each other in the oblique, emotionally constipated tones of a Noël Coward drama. Francesca thinks it smart to imitate African English. The novel has a notably tin ear for human speech. Someone who is clearly not from a Glasgow housing scheme asks: ‘Where is it, somewhere in Walter Pater, where he says that Leonardo says that ...”

“... left. I know that not saying anything is tantamount to acquiescence (silence is consent). I was a coward. So I want to put her stance on the record ...”