“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... addicted to Victorian novels. Yet when he is making love-talk it is sometimes remarkably like Noel Coward on stage with Gertie Lawrence. On the whole, though, the English language is not over-inflected with status symbols – not even a du or a tu. Pam’s husband wants his elder brothers to call him ‘Mister Hargreaves’, when they are painting his ...”

“... And intellectual proclivities. At speaking English he is Leslie Howard: At playing the piano, Noel Coward. There’s consolation in a fairy-tale, But none when Lech Walesa is released – Surely the final proof that he must fail. In back rooms as a species of lay priest He might say mass but only in a pale Reflection of that sacrificial feast When Poland at ...”

“... in Singapore. Even Wodehouse became an American citizen, almost as bizarre a transition as Noël Coward becoming Nigerian. So did Christopher Isherwood, on whom there is an uninspired contribution from Katherine Bucknell. Wendy Lesser remarks on what she sees as Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncanny ability to re-create alien cultures. In his deceptively ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at Cecconi’s’ and ‘Farewell Performance’. Imagine Cavalcanti crossed with Noel Coward, for Merrill slips easily from sybilline utterance into silkiest nonsense. He was hissed at a literary festival on ‘regional poetry’ in northern Minnesota when he expressed his disdain of the local product. As he scurried out, he whispered to Richard ...”

“... In some respects, Wilson deserves all he gets. As an academic he was a charlatan; as a critic a coward and a bully. He was a forgettable poet and a bad novelist. On the other hand, he wrote the neglected masterpiece of Scottish Romanticism. The Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of fictitious symposia set in a real Edinburgh tavern (Ambrose’s of Picardy ...”

“... soul to the devil. In the span of fifty pages, one pamphlet managed to call him a liar, traitor, coward, slave, tyrant, tiger, perjurer, murderer, parricide, assassin, devil, thief, sybarite, atheist heretic and knave, while comparing him unfavourably to Machiavelli, Herod, Absalom, Heliogabalus, Sardanapalus, Decius, Nebuchadnezzar, Julian the Apostate and ...”

“... Piper who lives in a ramshackle house above Robin Hood’s Bay. Dulcie is friends with Noël Coward and knows about wine, literature and the names of plants. Over the course of a long summer she introduces Robert to good food and the writing of D.H. Lawrence, and makes mawkish statements like ‘books are just paper, but they contain within them ...”

“... literary types and promising young men – from the ex-queen of Spain to Wallis Simpson to Noël Coward and, on one occasion, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Maugham’s appetite for society sat oddly alongside his aloofness. One guest recalled that he would come to meet new arrivals with outstretched arms in a gesture of welcome, then ‘the arms would drop ...”

“... than those who followed a career in gardening, cookery or design. The Boxes, nicknamed by Noël Coward ‘the Brontës of Shepherds Bush’, didn’t die at the Elephant but neither did they or their contemporaries blaze a trail. The scarcity of female directors and producers in the film industry is still marked and periodically lamented. The same is true ...”

“... missed’s mystery’), but cameras and binoculars were now available. The ornithologist T.A. Coward, writing about the cream-coloured courser in 1920, put the case clearly: ‘If there is no error about the facts – that the birds were seen in the flesh is not absolute proof – what is the excuse for the slaughter? Why may a man shoot birds which, so ...”

“... unbearable … You didn’t have the courage to face it. That is your guilt … you are a moral coward.Bravo! But also: bonkers. ‘No double-blind survey would ever prove that flicking the red was a sign of genocidal moral cowardice,’ Searls writes, but it’s such a good story: more true than real, like Lady Macbeth. The stories about the Rorschach ...”

“... figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the aims of her study is to rescue Gurney’s later work from accusations of madness, and offer it as evidence of his ...”