Masquerade

The Lives of Noël Coward

By: Oliver Soden

Narrated by: Oliver Soden

'This is the biography - truthful, sympathetic and thorough - that Coward deserves'
DAILY TELEGRAPH

The voice, the dressing-gown, the cigarette in its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit is not in production somewhere in the world. Phrases from Noël Coward's songs - "Mad About The Boy", "Mad Dogs and Englishman" - are forever lodged in the public consciousness. He was at one point the most highly paid author in the world. Yet some of his most striking and daring writing remains unfamiliar. As T.S. Eliot said, in 1954, "there are things you can learn from Noël Coward that you won't learn from Shakespeare".

Coward wrote some fifty plays and nine musicals, as well as revues, screenplays, short stories, poetry, and a novel. He was both composer and lyricist for approximately 675 songs. Louis Mountbatten's famous tribute argued that, while there were greater comedians, novelists, composers, painters and so on, only "the master" had combined fourteen talents in one. So central was he to his age's theatre that any account of his career is also a history of the British stage. And so daring was Coward's unorthdoxy in his closest relationships, obliquely reflected throughout his writing, that it must also be a history of sexual liberation in the twentieth century. In Oliver Soden's sparkling, story-packed new Life, the Master finally gets his due.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Oliver Soden (P)2023 Orion Publishing Group Limited

Critic reviews

What a pleasure it is to read a book into which so much labour, and so much affection, have evidently gone. But the labour is never flaunted and the affection is mingled with the same sophisticated irony that made Coward such a giant of the theatre. This is the biography - truthful, sympathetic and thorough - that Coward deserves (Nikhil Krishnan)

Assiduous, even-handed, readable . . . astute (Dominic Maxwell)

Excellent . . . reveals Coward to be a more complex individual than we had acknowledged (Michael Billington)

A captivating biography (Kate Maltby)

Beautifully Written

I found this biography so well read and written. Soden captures Cowards life with great complexity. He also establishes the contexts through which Cowards create work moved and with which it engaged. He does so with such clarity, dare I say, respect.