Allowing your friend to believe that you too think her six-act play about the invention of the cotton gin is bound for Broadway and of course Hugh Jackman would be an excellent choice to play Eli Whitney is not an act of mercy, but one of cowardice (albeit well-intentioned).

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He spent his working life largely at Harvard, relishing the intellectual fizz as the wartime generation returned to study, using wisely the great freedom granted to tenured professors like himself, but increasingly disgusted in later years by academic trendiness and moral cowardice.

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To be fair to Mrs Merkel and Europe's other leaders, they have not chosen to muddle through merely out of cowardice, though there has been plenty of that, but because the euro-zone countries are profoundly divided.

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But instead of giving him intensive medical treatment, officers there charged Pogany with cowardice, a military crime punishable by death.

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But a piece in La Stampa newspaper criticised Venice's council, saying "administrative cowardice" had won out over real culture.

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Afterwards Mr Clegg said he "would have been a distraction" if he was there but several Conservative MPs criticised his decision to stay away, one accusing him of "cowardice", while Labour said it was evidence that the government was irreparably divided over Europe.

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