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“... 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 ...”

“... dampens the impact. There are famous lyricists who get a headmaster’s lashing – one is Noël Coward and another is Lorenz Hart. Sondheim is brilliant on Coward – ‘brittle and sentimental’, he says, and then adds: ‘condescending’. He allows that Coward has ‘charm’, but ...”

“... of ignoble fear in the face of pain, danger or difficulty’; according to Chambers, a coward may be a ‘pusillanimous person’, someone ‘wanting firmness of mind … mean-spirited’. Cowardice is deemed to be unimpressive, inappropriate, a shameful fear. We are cowardly when we are not at our best, when frightened. But there are acceptable ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... shoulders of the individual, and sell their varying brands of ‘natural’ salvation. In Rosalind Coward’s view, this is the Protestant curse, developed now into an ideology only too compatible with individualist capitalism, despite all the show of opposition to the unhealthy industrialised world. Her prose is extensive, explanatory, careful; there’s too ...”

“... of his income, even when he was earning a lot of money. He wrote far too much, far too fast. Noel Coward would have served Connolly as a better comparison than Auden or Waugh. As social and, at times, just as silly as Nichols, he had that core of steel that Beverley lacked. His craftsmanship and his awareness of his own limitations have ensured his ...”

“... publications), and so it is with the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than ...”

“... mother or the Soviet regime. He is anxious, indecisive (outside the musical realm), something of a coward. A ‘thorough-going neurotic’, even a ‘hysteric’, in his own self-diagnosis. His mother and his scientist wife, Nina (Nita to her family), are the dominant characters in his immediate milieu. ‘Sometimes, after a successful concert, when he had ...”

“... 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 ambiguity’. Castle ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more famous friends (Somerset Maugham, Claudette Colbert, their Jamaica neighbour Noël Coward), but details of their social life are sketchy. When Truman Capote pays a visit, Fleming writes to Ann: ‘Can you imagine a more incongruous playmate for me?’ He seems happiest discussing technical details, as when a gun expert, Geoffrey ...”

“... and Canada there not being much to choose. Easter Monday. Watch two programmes on Noël Coward, wishing now I’d agreed to be interviewed for them. I’d said no on the grounds that my acquaintance with him was too slight, but Wesker appears whose connection was even slighter. I saw Coward first in New York in ...”

“... 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 seemed to be no gap ...”

“... charts Osborne’s transformation from the Angry Young Man of the late 1950s via ‘the faux Coward sophisticate and surly teddy boy’ of the 1960s to the English country squire of the 1980s and 1990s. People who knew Osborne personally (which I didn’t) speak warmly of the quality of his company; however, most also acknowledge that his refusal to edit ...”

“... panoply of the country house as home, with its limited diversions and heavy obligations. As Noël Coward put it, ‘The fact that they have to be rebuilt/and frequently mortgaged to the hilt/is inclined to take the gilt/off the gingerbread.’ Coward himself, who was born in Waldegrave Road, Teddington, represented one new ...”