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“... East and West. It is crystal clear from Michael Howard’s writings that he was never, in Mrs Thatcher’s phrase, ‘one of us’. Like many other dons and civil servants who began their careers during the Second World War, he believes in a nation beyond party which it is the duty of an enlightened élite to discover and promote. He might, perhaps, be ...”

“... are the true idealists: their religion is free-market capitalism, their gods Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, their gospel the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal. They are arch Clinton-haters (the book begins in 1993), and despise affirmative action, feminism, the disabled and everything else Cath’s moral conscience would like to stand up ...”

“... overfond of aristocratic titles and the ceremonial and sartorial trappings that went with them (Margaret Thatcher once berated him for his trademark Homburg). His most famous bon mot was that, in sacking a third of his cabinet on the Night of the Long Knives, Harold Macmillan demonstrated the truth that ‘greater love hath no man than this, that he ...”

“... sees the fall of Communism overwhelmingly in terms of the personal roles of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the triumph of American democracy and capitalism, Westad points out that for a decade before the Soviet Union collapsed, the decision of the Chinese Communists to abandon socialist economics and move to a form of capitalism had been ...”

“... that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a resounding 67 per cent majority in favour of continued EEC membership. Whitelaw confessed in his memoirs that he had rather ...”

“... commercially-minded, unsentimental head, just as the nation had been doing since 1979. Porter was Margaret Thatcher’s mini-me; they were even both the daughters of grocers, though Jack Cohen’s Tesco proved to be a more lasting success than Alderman Roberts’s shop in Grantham. Porter rode high in public and party esteem thanks to a passionately ...”

“... of violence’. Some attacks in England, such as the Brighton bomb that came close to killing Margaret Thatcher, or the bombs that killed two of her closest parliamentary aides, Airey Neave and Ian Gow, provoked momentary outrage, as did those that killed guardsmen and their horses in the royal parks. A missile fired from a truck and narrowly missing ...”

“... of discontent of 1979 – exactly brackets the age of consensus, swept away a few months later by Margaret Thatcher, ‘that bitch’, as Maudling called her. Another reading is possible. Maudling’s generation – growing up during the Depression and the war – were, more than most, attracted by the notion of putting division and conflict behind ...”

“... line supposed to demonstrate two of the received national characteristics, class and modesty. Then Margaret Thatcher died (her funeral was another good show) and there was a lot of talk about the way the country had changed since she became prime minister, a year before I joined Mrs Hazel’s class. Arguments ran along predictable lines: the privatisation ...”

“... the most loyal and devoted of Her Majesty’s subjects. But for all that, the true-blue-rinse Thatcher years have not been a happy or an easy time for the House of Windsor. In public, the Prime Minister professes respect and admiration for her sovereign lady and the whole royal family. But it is difficult to believe that in private she offers the same ...”

“... grabbing at the opinions of those she admires (men in general unless they’re socialists, and Margaret Thatcher: ‘Margaret was the only woman who understood money’).‘Look what happens,’ she says, summing up the damage done by ‘Women’s Lib’. ‘We have got more children taking drugs than ever ...”

“... Eighties it is difficult to think he was wrong. Mr Horne manages to believe that ‘eight years of Thatcher monetarism have been the success story of its time.’ Indeed, he sometimes gives the impression that he would have been happier writing the authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher. He indulges in forays against ...”

“... on the future. The great Maastricht debate was mainly prosecuted by politicians who, from Lady Thatcher downwards, believed it was the moment to fix a Maginot line beyond which the previous momentum for integration would not pass. The terms of the argument they made therefore tended to be inward-looking and, above all, anachronistic. They worried more than ...”

“... of people, mainly Aborigines, may have died as a direct result of the fall-out from the blasts. Margaret Thatcher has insisted that no one was used as a guinea pig by the Ministry of Defence: the evidence that she is not telling the truth is overwhelming. Two books, probably the first of a line, chronicle the testing and the subsequent cover-up. Clouds ...”

“... Later, most spectacularly, he achieved a personal ascendancy over both Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher. He used to tell Thatcher stories of the Zulus, to which, J.D.F. Jones was told by a frustrated civil servant, ‘she would listen with delight, her jaw agape.’ (‘No evil thought ever entered his ...”