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“... Peel died, screaming with pain after a fall from his horse, one aristocrat remarked: ‘he lived a coward, and he has died one.’ Read does not quote this: but he should have done. It shows just how far Peel had out-raged conventional patrician values. He had placed firm executive control before the duty owed to honourable connections in Parliament. To this ...”

“... mouthpieces are half-crazed kings – important folk. Even Parolles – the exposed cheat and coward who says ‘Simply the things I am shall make me live’ – has a name and distinct character. The people of the City are anonymous and, apart from a cripple trying to revert to infancy, all grimly stoical. Macbeth and Lear have earned their hell by wrong ...”

“... always carries a hateful piece of her husband around with her. He may be a bit of a bully or a coward (the character is fleshed out just enough for us to find him slightly repellent), but in essence he’s only an odious narrative impediment, someone who just keeps getting in the way. Doon, for example, is divorced but still sleeps regularly with her ...”

“... 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 property. In ...”

“... has been depicted variously as a cynical opportunist, patient genius or lucky engineer, and dies a coward, a hypocrite or a modern Socrates. The telescopic discoveries catapulted him from his protected existence in Padua, where his friends included some of the most interesting and controversial intellectuals in Europe, men such as Paolo Sarpi and Cesare ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Byng, the son of a viscount, was condemned for failing to relieve Minorca not because he was a coward, but because he had not done ‘his utmost to take or destroy the enemy’s ships’. In earlier failures, such as the Battle of Toulon (1744), having friends and relations in positions of influence at home had proved sufficient to protect ineffectual ...”

“... promoted, decorated but, of course, remains the same unregenerate cad, bounder, lecher, knave and coward who bullied and basted the lower forms at Rugby. In Fraser’s version he is lovable with it. Fraser’s neo-Victorianism draws principally on writers of adventure books such as A.E.W. Mason (The Four Feathers) and Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda). The ...”

“... referendum defeat. Yet I sense again that May is much less confident than she seems. She isn’t a coward – remember how she faced down the Police Federation as home secretary. But she is tidy-minded and hates a gamble. In time, she may give the first minister some of what she wants – just enough, perhaps, to allow Sturgeon to put off that ...”

“... destroys the town’s only institutional conscience (since the local sheriff is a fawning coward), the offices and printing presses of a newspaper called the Shinbone Star – but not before somehow infecting its editor (Edmond O’Brien, who’d earlier played Winston Smith in 1984) with a kind of language virus, resulting in the dismaying ...”

“... common to many novels of hardscrabble America, presenting book-learning as the refuge of a vicious coward and applauding mastery of the body and land. But it also offers a brisk sociopolitical survey of northern California: Tallent shows us, in Jacob and Brett, what learning brings, and he presents their upper-middle-class families as self-possessed and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and democracy’. In the age of Vietnam and Watergate, a writer portrayed Revere as ‘a coward and traitor who sang like a canary to his British captors, and betrayed his friends to save his own skin’. The latest incarnation, according to Professor Fischer, approaches Revere ‘as a figure of high complexity who is interesting both for what he was ...”

“... strikes you as too shrill and heated? But, being committedly Japanese and sentient, neither a coward nor an ingrate, how could I remain cool, calm and collected about Mishima? The Nobel Prize-winning writer, Kawabata, whom Mishima had worshipped as his master could not long remain untouched by Mishima’s choice of death: he quietly gassed himself less ...”

“... should have written sooner but there was a rush of plans for holidays, a promotion party for Noël Coward, a television party ...’) In this she was at least evenhanded, asking for no more sympathy than she gave. She spent a week in a nursing-home because she’d been drinking too much; and told Patrick Leigh Fermor that Diana Cooper had rung her there ‘and ...”