Favourite heroes - some of mine, some of my friends'... Do you recognise them? Can you name them? Can your friends?

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1  A Play: When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

2  There was a laughing devil in his sneer,
    That raised emotions both of rage and fear;
    And where his frown of hatred darkly fell,
    Hope withering fled and Mercy sighed farewell.

3  I traced the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth; but had not reached middle age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared . . . but the frown, the roughness of the traveller, set me at my ease.

4   Of course he is a Socialist, and he has unconventional ideas; maybe he wouldn't mind marrying into the proletariat so much as some men might.

5   His massive figure seemed, while she spoke thus to him, to stiffen still more, the strong mouth hardened, a look of relentless obstinacy crept into the habitually lazy blue eyes.

"With what object, I pray you, Madame?" he asked coldly.

"I do not understand you."

"Yet `tis simple enough," he said with sudden bitterness, which seemed literally to surge through his words, though he was making visible efforts to suppress it, "I humbly put the question to you, for my slow wits are unable to grasp the cause of this, your ladyship's sudden new mood. Is it that you have the taste to renew the devilish sport which you played so successfully last year? Do you wish to see me once more a love-sick suppliant at your feet, so that you might again have the pleasure of kicking me aside, like a troublesome lap-dog?"

6   He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

7   … a stranger, standing alone in the hall, staring at her in a cool, impertinent way that brought her up sharply … He looked quite old - at least thirty-five. He was a tall man and powerfully built. [She] thought she had never seen a man with such wide shoulders, so heavy with muscles - almost too heavy for gentility. ... He was dark of face, swarthy as a pirate, and his eyes were as bold and black as any pirate's appraising a galleon to be scuttled or a maiden to be ravished. There was a cool recklessness in his face and a cynical humour in his mouth as he smiled at her.

8   A movie: She: Will I see you tonight? He : I never make plans that far ahead.

9   And, I think for the first time, I began to see him as he really was - not any more as a projection of my young romantic longings, not any more as Prince Charming, the handsome sophisticate, the tiger I thought I preferred . . . This was [a man] who had been a quiet lonely little boy in a house that was "not a house for children", an unhappy adolescent brought up in the shadow of a megalomaniac father, a young man fighting bitterly to save his small inheritance from ruin … wild, perhaps, hard, perhaps, plunging off the beaten track more than once … but always alone.

10   He was alone, sprawling in the carved armchair at the head of the table … He was always rather careless of his appearance, but never had [she] seen him so untidy. He had loosened his neckcloth, and his waistcoat hung open, and his black hair looked as if he had been in a high wind… The harsh lines of his face seemed to be accentuated, and his sneer was strongly marked. As [she] moved softly forward into the candlelight he at last turned his eyes and looked at her. She stood still, shyness and mischief in her smile, and a hint of enquiry. He stared uncomprehendingly at her, and then, startling her, lifted his hand to his eyes, to shut her from his sight, ejaculating in a thickened voice of repulsion: 'Oh God! No!'

11   [He] strolled alongside her with the gentle swagger that makes women thoughtful and men's knuckles go white.

12   Lord, he was big. He'd changed into a clean T-shirt, but he still wore the camouflage fatigue pants he'd been wearing earlier tonight. With his shirt pulled tight across his mile-wide shoulders and broad chest, with his shaved head gleaming in the dim barroom light, he looked impossibly dangerous. And incredibly handsome in a harshly masculine way.

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