“... to kill him for not obeying them, he would have taken no notice of their threats. He was not the coward Stone implies; his concerns really were other-worldly, and unpolitical – and by modern, utilitarian standards pretty inhuman. Like I.F. Stone, Pericles might well have thought Socrates a lousy citizen, since Pericles agreed with most of Athens that a man ...”

“... first seductive bars of “La Paloma” ’, we may hear not only Firbank, but the rhythms of Noel Coward, ‘in a bar at the Piccolo Marina’, where life came to Mrs ...”

“... excoriating, maudlin, self-pitying, iconoclastic rhetoric, to belong more to the world of Noël Coward than that of Edward Bond. Far from looking back in anger, it looks back with a fierce, despairing, nostalgia. Is there a more solipsistic cry from the post-war years – when the world has become better informed than ever about mass ...”

“... here out of 24, with the list headed by the Duke of Westminster. (‘It always is,’ as Noel Coward almost put it.) The present Duke clocks in at £4200 million – not bad for a lad who left Harrow with two 0-Levels. There are ten other Harrovians in the list, compared with 78 Etonians. ‘By a curious trick of statistics,’ the editors ...”

“... the protagonist’s office, or perhaps his mind, was occupied by militant students, crying coward; in The Women’s Hour, Sidney’s garden, or perhaps his mind, is occupied by militant feminists, crying rape. Both of these novels are topographies of paranoia. But Caute is now also concerned to portray clashes among women themselves, and he marshals a ...”

“... 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 spent his ...”

“... ash tree at Winter town end, and how many miles I travelled for her sake was 440 and odd.’ The coward in the marriage stakes is William Ashcombe. At the age of 17, he ‘was much importuned to marry my Lady Garrard’s daughter’ – ‘I saw her and no more.’ At 18, he was offered Kate Howard, but ‘being half afraid of the greatness of her spirit I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was always the political equivalent of a flirt. His claim, made in the 1880s, that ‘I was a coward until Marx made a communist of me’ sounds stirring enough. On 13 November 1887 the 31-year-old Shaw took part in the famous, and illegal, demonstration for free speech which came to be known as Bloody Sunday. The march set out from Clerkenwell ...”

“... self-regard and not own up to the fact that he was, for all his intellectual brilliance, a moral coward, a vacillator and a compromiser’. Heffer’s loathing obscures the fact that the personal relationship between sovereign and Prime Minister is as important a factor in the way constitutional monarchy develops as formal constitutional law, precedent and ...”

“... idea of leaving Australia, but that only made departure the more necessary, to show I was not a coward. Leaving, moreover, meant doing what my father wanted (though I would have denied the relevance of this), while at the same time putting an ocean between us. It was a dark journey that I made in 1964 with my cohort of Commonwealth Scholars, the first to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... country’s armed forces and willingly gave it some thought afterwards, can be characterised as a coward and an enemy of freedom, while his opponent is engulfed in glory for having had a father influential enough to keep him out of harm’s way. With their advertisements on television paid for by well-connected Republicans, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ...”

“... 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 trifle ...”