Indeed the enormity of the war seemed to have had an effect on the British psyche: the soldiers who had to retreat behind taciturnity in the face of the horror of their experience.Language, for Coward and his generation, was a defensive weapon - it is no coincidence that his speech was so clipped and quickfire that it sounded like a Gatling gun going off - while what was said was so often the opposite of what was meant. Sung by the heroine of Bitter-Sweet, it is nonetheless, in Coward's voice (and indeed in the Pet Shop Boys's recent cover of the song) a cri de coeur: "Life is a very rough and tumble/For a humble/Diseuse/ One can betray one's troubles never/Whatever/Occurs/Night after night/Have to look bright/Whether you're well or ill.""Subtlety, discretion, restraint, finesse, charm, intelligence, good manners, talent and glamour still enchant me," he declared 30 years later, with the unequivocation of one who had been a Bright Young Thing, an exemplar of an era in which emotion was masked because so much emotion had been suffered - in the Great War. I enjoy it for what it's worth and fully intend to go on doing so for as long as anybody's interested and when the time comes that they're not I shall be perfectly content to settle down with an apple and a good book!" Boy George - the Queen Mother of Pop - announced in the sexually overt 1980s that personally, he preferred "a nice cup of tea".It was an almost shocking statement for the time, and is counterpointed by George Michael's recent appearance on the Parkinson Show, when he spoke openly of sex in public lavatories in a manner which seemed to mark a sea-change in the attitudes of Blairite Britain: the pop aristocrat as pop philosopher, personifying a new morality apparently condoned by a venerable, highly-respected representative of old TV (and, indeed, by his association with that other exemplar of overt emotionalism, the late Princess Diana).In 1929, Coward wrote the defining lyric of his career: "If Love Were All". There is no need to embarrass anyone."Coward's approach finds echoes with a more recent, and apparently outre gay media figure: Boy George. Coward, in his autobiographical play of 1939, Present Laughter (currently revived at the West Yorkshire Playhouse with Ian McKellen in the central role), announced, a propos of sex: "To me the whole business is vastly over-rated.

"Taste may be vulgar," he declared, "But it must never be embarrassing. On Fire Island, it is more than unattractive, it's macabre, sinister, irritating and somehow tragic." How much more shocked would The Master have been to walk down present-day Old Compton St, or Manchester's gay village For Coward, the point was one of exhibition. When a New York friend took him to the openly gay resort of Fire Island in the mid-Sixties, he was appalled: "I have always been of the opinion that a large group of queer men was unattractive. "You're queer as a coot and you have been all your life." Here, towards the very end of his own life, Coward appeared to be questioning his own emotional reticence at a time when homosexuality was about to be decriminalised, and when the "plays with a message" Coward hated (if invited to attend one such, he'd quote an actress friend who declared, "Then I shan't dress") of Osborne, Pinter et al challenged that very reticence.For Coward, sex and sexuality was always a matter of good taste. The last completed play Coward wrote was A Song At Twilight, revived this month by Sheridan Morley at the King's Head Theatre.

It is an intricately woven tribute to Coward's own reticence, and that of Somerset Maugham, on whom the play's irascible main character is based.Hugo Latymer, a married, aged writer, is suddenly faced with evidence of his homosexuality produced by a former (female) lover "Homosexual tendencies in the past?" she retorts. His is a world of our parents' generation, a world rapidly disappearing as we leave the century behind, a world of different values, and different voices. In my turn-of-the-century Chambers Dictionary - published in the year of Coward's birth, one of the definitions of reticence is "concealment by silence". In our fierce, overheated world of self-revelation and exposure, where you can read of the intimate lives of not only the rich and famous, but the obscure and infamous, Coward's attitude seems increasingly enviable. At one point in the film, Laura declares, "Do you know, I believe we should all behave quite differently if we lived in a warm, sunny climate all the time We shouldn't be so withdrawn and shy and difficult". It's a tale of a would-be extra-marital affair in a mythic Forties suburbia still strikes a chord - perhaps because it evokes a time when emotions were still under control in an globally unwarmed climate.

Noel Coward's centenary is celebrated this year in a veritable flood of revivals of his plays and screenings of his films, none more affecting than the classic Brief Encounter. ONE HUNDRED years ago, this century's most quintessential Englishman was born. Anglicans pray at the Eucharist for the common good.A Labour government may give up a policy of common ownership; it may downplay a policy of wealth distribution; it cannot, however, give up asking the question about the common good from the standpoint of those least able to stand up for themselves.. It is operated by human beings who, and I say this without any sense of moral judgement, pursue their own interests.Moreover, although these human beings are certainly capable of altruism, when it comes to industrial or commercial life we have the same paradox as we have in patriotism: individual unselfishness can be transmuted into corporate selfishness.There are losers - not only companies that go bust because they lose their share of the market, but whole groups of people, even societies, that fail to share in the increasing prosperity.It has recently been argued that the present government's policy is best seen in terms of Catholic social teaching, particularly the concept of the common good It is not an exclusively Catholic term. But the market as it in fact operates is dominated by capital, that is, human beings and institutions with money. But the point I would want to repeat, in relation to both New Labour and William Hague's evolving Christian philosophy, is this: the market, as we have it, as it is operated, cannot be regarded simply as a neutral mechanism that will equally benefit everyone who plays according to its rules.It may be true that a market, in its earliest, simplest expression, operates on a level playing field.A peasant takes eggs to market and buys some leather shoes.