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“... presses her arm.) CYNTHIA: Don’t touch me. From Act One, Scene Three. Estate of the late ...”

“... Cathay. It makes an undistinguished stopover, but has one claim to notice: it is where, in 1930, Noël Coward holed up, suffering from flu and, with only a pad of paper and an Eversharp pencil, wrote Private Lives in four days (having earlier conceived the plot during a restless night in Tokyo, when he was visited by a shimmering vision of Gertrude ...”

“... In the film about Noël Coward that Adam Low made for Arena in 1998, there is a shot of Arnold Wesker watching a recording of a Royal Court fundraising gala in which Coward is marvellous but clearly miserable as the restaurant owner in an extract from Wesker’s The Kitchen ...”

“... Is Robert Lowell Better than Noel Coward, Howard? W.H. Auden’s little poem has passed into the folk memory without, so far as we know, ever having seen print. The editor in question is Howard Moss, who runs the poetry in the New Yorker ...”

“... Noël Coward never believed he had just a talent to amuse. A man who spent a lifetime merchandising his de-luxe persona, Coward liked to make a distinction between accomplishment and vanity: ‘I’m bursting with pride, which is why I have no vanity.’ A performer’s job is to be sensational; and in his songs, plays and public performances, Coward lived up to the responsibility of making a proper spectacle of himself ...”

“... startling good looks with his massive creative intelligence and devastating wit, and that was Noel Coward. In the presence of both I suffer, or suffered, from a raging feeling of inadequacy. My inferiority was not helped in the case of my first meeting with Noel Coward by being invited by him in his suite in the Savoy Hotel ...”

“... Parker is discussed, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the personalities of Marie Tempest, Noel Coward, Eddie Marsh, the Aga Khan; there are pensées on playing bridge, the reasons why the American dislike the English, an account of what it’s like to have one’s portrait painted; there are some unexceptionable short stories and a playlet. There are ...”

“... temperament, it is the treat of the year. It was the treat of a lifetime for Noel Coward. His diaries open in 1941, when he was already enjoying a warm bath of celebrity. ‘Lunched Dorchester with Bob Menzies,’ he begins. ‘He was absolutely charming. Came away comfortably reassured that I had done a really good job there.’ Meetings for ...”

“... I am dead.’ ‘You can’t be dead – you’re the greatest living writer.’ ‘No, no, Noël Coward is the greatest living writer.’ ‘But Noël Coward is dead.’ ‘Oh,’ said Genet, ‘that’s good.’ There was our caption. No editing needed. David had the ear of a natural writer – there ...”

“... of their characters. Among the British contingent, none is more satisfying in this way than Noel Coward, who was caught at Heathrow in transit from his home in Jamaica to his home in Switzerland. It is 6 a.m. and you can hear in the background what a British transport arena used to sound like before the days of interminable announcements. It is not too early ...”

“... My great new friend is Noël Coward’, Nancy Mitford confided to a correspondent in 1949. ‘Bliss. He shakes like a jelly at one’s jokes, I adore that.’ It was laughs Nancy Mitford wanted, much more than grandeur. She longs to make people laugh, and sometimes, almost in the manner of a nervous stand-up comedienne, interrupts her letters to make sure that the audience is suitably convulsed ...”

“... this century. He has never, however, been an innovator, like his friends Alfred Hitchcock and Noel Coward; he has helped-creative talent to flourish, but always as a promoter, a showman. It was his idea to hang a picture of P. T. Barnum in every office in Granada Television. He is arguably the most successful of the television barons. Lord Bernstein himself ...”

“... to her own not terribly tragic life. Early in her suggestive and elegantly written study of Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall, Terry Castle admits that Hall’s ‘style is for the most part the antithesis of Coward’s – painfully discursive, polemical, almost entirely devoid of gaiety, archness or ...”

“... And in Bangkok at 12 o’clock? It needs an effort of imagination to think of Noel Coward reading The Golden Bough (popular abridged edition, 1922), but he catches perfectly the scatter-effect of Late Victorian and Edwardian anthopology practised according to the comparative method, above all by Frazer, from whose legendary notebooks the ...”

“... He was a mixture of Pan and Peter Pan. Clive Fisher, who has written a very good book on Noel Coward, was quite right to give this elegant study the subtitle ‘A Nostalgic Life’. Being Anglo-Irish helped the nostalgia. Connolly senior had been a Major in the British Army and when he retired became an expert conchologist – shells to shells, as one ...”