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“... players are here – Bob Dylan, the Stones, Phil Spector – but also the Duchess of Windsor, Noël Coward, Peter Stringfellow, Malcolm Sargent, Beryl Bainbridge, John Birt, Jonathan Aitken, Edward Heath et al. This isn’t just a confetti of toe-curling names. Brown catches a moment when discrete segments of society were slowly coalescing into an ...”

“... Viscount Rothermere and his wife in the spring of 1949, Princess Margaret took the microphone from Noël Coward and tried to sing ‘Let’s Do It’, only to be greeted by ‘a prolonged and thunderous booing’ from one of the guests. Caroline Blackwood, ‘enthralled’ by the interruption, asked the man next to her who had caused it. ‘It was that ...”

“... then he is of a weak and servile spirit; if grave, then proud; if considerate in danger, then a coward; if valorous, rash; if silent, cunning; if a discourses, then one that loves to hear himself talk. When John Baptist came neither eating, nor drinking, they said he had a devil; and when our Saviour came eating, and drinking, they said, ‘Behold a ...”

“... who made her audience share that vision. And she was not alone: Peggy Ashcroft came from Croydon, Noël Coward from the suburbs and Alec Guinness was the son of a barmaid. But all of them had some sense of their proper position in life, a fantasy of what they wanted to be which these days would probably be disapproved of or discouraged, fantasy frowned ...”

“... on a concrete platform like the bridge of a giant destroyer (In Which We Serve, with me as Noel Coward) to watch the procession of bin lorries that swept into the bays to drop off their rubbish. Outside, I could see two huge ash-heaps, the latest cinders of the 24-hour fires, and beyond them the high flats of Enfield, and I wondered whether an examination ...”

“... were when the phrase ‘jet set’ was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air ...”

“... be that arresting phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy Cunard, Noël Coward, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Lady Diana Cooper and countless other hedonistic Jazz Age types, Murphy, de Acosta and Garland took the right to play for granted, as well they might. Puritanism was an anachronism and in some renovated pagan sense ...”

“... his book their authority. He is capable of Victorian candour – he calls Marcuse a ‘miserable coward’, which is almost what Stephen called Jowett – and he can be pretty hard on Leslie’s shortcomings. Yet there is also a tenderness, and a willingness to defend his man from unjust strictures. One sees this in his remarks about Stephen’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... vivid enough in itself, the multiplication yields no cogent physical image: Rogier Van der Weyden, Noël Coward, Rubens, Delacroix, Goya cancel one another out. Can the sequence be justified as the impress on the narrator’s perceptions of someone essentially elusive, across successive conflicting emotions and the passage of time? Perhaps. But the ...”

“... others likeable, yet others (the majority) just ridiculous . . . He is vain and conceited. He is a coward. He loves nature deeply. And he forgets the German language. So ends the first part of Interesting Times. From a literary point of view, it could well have stopped there. We would then have had something close to those masterpieces of calm ...”