“... last night with Michael before he went down to Plymouth’. But he chose to spend it instead with Noël Coward, with whom he was in the midst of a wild romance. The night Vanessa was born, when Larry announced a daughter to Laertes, Redgrave cried with joy and kissed everyone, as members of the cast crowded into his dressing room bearing flowers. He rang ...”

“... Eden as a lightweight either because of his mannerisms – the ‘My Dear’ which echoed Noel Coward and annoyed Dean Acheson – or because of the striking good looks which prompted jealous Italian journalists to dub him ‘Lord Eyelashes’. But everyone to some extent reflects the social usages of his time and place, and if it is true that most ...”

“... of Ring Lardner’s The Ecstasy of Owen Muir. Small wonder that writers from Robert Graves to Noel Coward to Isaiah Berlin have been inflated to fill up gaps. It is the greatest of Douglas’s posthumous misfortunes that his brilliant inward-looking talents, so suited to a time obsessed by inward identities, should have guaranteed him a place as one of its ...”

“... Bedfordshire and Canada there not being much to choose. Easter Monday. Watch two programmes on Noël Coward, wishing now I’d agreed to be interviewed for them. I’d said no on the grounds that my acquaintance with him was too slight, but Wesker appears whose connection was even slighter. I saw Coward first in New ...”

“... In London they had little suppers in restaurants and saw Charlie Chaplin in Shoulder arms and Noel Coward in Hay Fever. To Cockerell it seemed that she was subsisting on tea and cigarettes, since Charlotte, like most women living on a fixed income, had the illusion of being much poorer than she really was. In 1924 he arranged a Civil List pension for her of ...”

“... woman, her performance of ‘Let’s Do It’ at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in Lancaster at the avocado counter. Her Dinnerladies was often sentimental, but she caught in the part of the handyman, played by Duncan Preston, the idiom of an ...”

“... of his presents, a silk dressing-gown (‘I’m wearing it to show that I am quite happy to direct Noël Coward if asked’). A wheelchair has been provided for a 90-year-old guest who hasn’t turned up, so Lindsay commandeers it and is wheeled around the room getting older by the minute. Full of all sorts of people, with showbusiness probably in a ...”

“... about to open. ‘Terribly Terribly Flat Cambridge Beware Too Much Local Colour All Success=Noel Coward.’ Hugh was moved to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on 4 May, now that he was out of danger of a second stroke; only the pneumonia remained. On Friday morning, to everyone’s amazement, he was in the stroke ward’s gym with two ...”

“... was an awful woman called Gallery Nell, who would go to a first night and if it wasn’t by Noel Coward she’d start the most terrifying booing going. AH: Was she thrown out? FW: No, no. The play would stagger on for another night, when I would be there reviewing it. Gallery Nell would still be there booing it, and then it would come off, and as I was ...”

“... to its dancefloor, where everybody was doing the Twist. Tennessee Williams, Merle Oberon and Noël Coward were regulars. Norman Mailer did the Twist with Lord Beaverbrook’s granddaughter. High society enjoyed slumming it, and the socialites, sailors and salesmen sweated it out together in the noisy gloom, posing, cruising, ogling. Press ...”

“... There were further travels, further books. The world-famous Maugham persona fell into place. Noël Coward caricatured it neatly in a play called Point Valaine (1935): ‘I always affect to despise human nature. Cynical, detached, unscrupulous, an ironic observer and recorder of other people’s passions. It is a nice façade to sit behind, but a ...”

“... a combination of writer, actor, singer and self-producer he is more plausibly compared with Noel Coward than with any of the cabaret stars. But Humphries, along with the right to shock, claims the right to bore. The originals of his satirised characters bore him, and he takes his revenge by making their simulacra boring in turn. They go on until the audience ...”

“... interpenetrate, as enemies and functions of each other. The element of the meretricious (what Noel Coward called the potency of cheap music) may be the reason that Larkin loved and remembered books like Chandler’s. Unhappy with the claims and stances of Modernism, Larkin cherished arts that were composedly unpretentious. The culturally refined ...”

“... came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have learned only five Greek words, in order to say: “Shut up, fat girl” and “Shut up, fat boy.”’ He also ...”

“... episode in which even a most elegant upper-class crony is shown in the war trilogy to be a coward under fire. In Brideshead Revisited he romanticised the Flyte family – though, it is worth pointing out, none of the individual Flytes. But he does not ask himself why he is dazzled by them. Pansy Lamb told Waugh that when she looked back on her ...”