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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... discharge and so should not be handed a white feather or otherwise harassed as a conscie or a coward. That was when he got the job at the arsenal and was able to move his family into the hutments.On the 1921 census John describes himself as ‘married’, so presumably he thought he was. In fact, he had been a widower for eleven years. He had married ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The duke thought that was right. ‘My mother was a cold woman,’ he said, and, he added, a moral coward who would ‘never, NEVER, talk to me about it. Right up to the end, if I said anything to her, she’d just cough slightly, hm, hm, like that and that was all.’ Pope-Hennessy’s view of the rift could be summarised in 1066 and All That terms as Queen ...”

“... Zimmerman of displaying ‘the disadvantages of openness’, of patronising Cather and making a coward of her. I’m not sure that openness is ever really a disadvantage, though over-simplification is; the autobiographical must be important for a writer who insists on the authenticity of her stories as memory. Her alienation from conventional femininity may ...”

“... our Finest Man.’ But after that the story dies away in minor ditties by Sagittarius, Noel Coward and William Scammell. Regretting the ‘remarkable shortage’ of ‘good, straight’ verse written about ‘public events in England over the past thirty years’, our anthologist adopts a policy of charitable evacuation. His collection seems to suggest ...”

“... to the failure of art to detach him from the maelstroms of public fame and private despair. Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence make an unsettling odd couple in a February 1931 New Yorker, their writhing bodies entangled and wrestling on the ground. As his large hand circles her thin neck, it fixes the actress’s long fingers and fingernails in rigor ...”

“... approval’ of ‘wits so exquisite and discriminating’ as Raymond Mortimer, Noël Coward and Desmond Shawe-Taylor; on the publication of a book of poems a flurry of plaudits – ‘grimly entertaining’, ‘brilliantly funny and intimate’ – is produced. Barbera and McBrien summarise and categorise her output according to theme; they treat ...”

“... in Tennyson Jesse. She lists some sirs, some publishers, and, at various points, Conrad, Maugham, Coward and Walpole, but she doesn’t tell us enough of what they said about her subject to persuade us that they are peculiarly valuable testaments to her incandescence. She does have a lot to say about the queue of eager aides and secretaries who acted as ...”

“... Smartly-rhyming lyrics drip down the page (and we know how Burgess enjoys the Byronic smartness of Coward-and-Porter verses), but we don’t feel that we’re at a Broadway show: it’s more like a knowing undergraduates’ ‘intimate revue’ – and your reviewer, as plain music-reader, would like Burgess’s tunes to be attached. (Words and music are best ...”

“... prefers – in this case less plausibly – to stick with his view of Chaucer as a determined coward (in which case he hardly needed to write such a provocative poem at all). At least commentators are agreed on one thing: texts written by members of one faction or another during a period of deadly civil war are especially likely not to tell the whole or ...”