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Noel Coward.
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Biography EssayNoel Coward was, after George Bernard Shaw, modern England's most prolific writer for the London stage. Throughout a career that spanned more than half a century, Coward was associated ...
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The English playwright, actor, and composer Noel Coward (1899-1973) was known for his genial urbanity and frequently acerbic wit.Noel Coward was born on December 16, 1899, in Teddingham, Middlesex, an...
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Noel Coward was, after George Bernard Shaw, modern England's most prolific writer for the London stage. Throughout a career that spanned more than half a century, Coward was associated with the lumin...
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"For me, the prewar past died on the day Mr. Neville Chamberlain returned with such gay insouciance from Munich," Noel Coward wrote in his diary (26 July 1945). Coward went on to write some twenty pla...
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Critical Essay by W. Somerset Maugham
It is in his dialogue that Mr. Coward has shown himself something of an innovator, for in his construction he has been content to use the current method of his da...
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Critical Essay by John Osborne
I have been quoting from ["The Noel Coward Diaries"] for three weeks, to an insolent, cowering wife and baffled, jeering friends. I first met The Master in...
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Critical Essay by Paul Fussell
At first I thought I wouldn't like [The Noël Coward Diaries], anticipating—correctly, it turned out—yards of theatrical gossip and name-dropp...
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Critical Essay by James Mccourt
Ezra Pound defined literature as news that stays news. Literature is achieved by the sweated labors of a temperament facing the facts. Sir Noël Coward, playwrigh...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
Mr. Coward is, or would have us believe that he is, extremely annoyed by those of his critics who inquire into his motives…. He adds, with the ai...
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Critical Essay by St. John Ervine
Mr. Coward, who has often been held up as himself the prototype of the post-war young man, does not fulfil the popular conception of an irritable and irritating perso...
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Critical Essay by John Raymond
Any discussion of the art of Noël Coward must necessarily turn on the distinction between 'Drama' and 'Theatre'—and the value, ...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
Whatever other enduring value [The Lyrics of Noël Coward] may turn out to possess, it will always be a fascinating document for the student of th...
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Critical Essay by Jere Real
One does not usually think of the late Sir Noël Coward, that ubiquitous eminence of the British theatre for five decades, as being particularly a "political...
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Critical Essay by Douglas Dunn
Reading Noel Coward's plays encourages the belief that there is a point where Literature and Show Business meet. While it is difficult to know exactly what happen...
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Critical Essay by John Lahr
Coward's theatrical impulse came from a sense of his persona, not a sense of life. From his first produced play, I'll Leave It to You …, to his last, A...
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Critical Essay by David Hare
[The Noel Coward Diaries] record a life largely given over to the theatre and the company of friends. Much time is spent stacking name upon name…. Though his worst ...
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