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“... to fight the war declared with such bureaucratic precision some ten days later. As it turned out, Margaret Thatcher didn’t bother to declare war in 1982 so Sir Gerald’s advice wasn’t required. Nor was war declared against Iraq in 1991 or 1998 or even in the Balkans in 1999. This is not because the executive has any anxieties about the Royal ...”

“... for a set of right-wing policies espoused in the 1970s by Augusto Pinochet, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and by miscellaneous demented conservatives ever since: ‘rolling back the state’ and ‘empowering the individual’ through privatisation, tax cuts and deregulation. But before that it referred to a body of theory about markets and ...”

“... best. Born in 1928, Smithson is among the youngest of the women she considers. A contemporary of Margaret Thatcher, Smithson, like Thatcher, made her way in a masculine environment by behaving like a man, only more so. Cooke is careful to avoid special pleading. Her tactful descriptions of Smithson as a woman who ...”

“... will have to be spent on safety, and the Government will have to require this of the clubs. Mrs Thatcher’s identification scheme has been deplored as unrealistic and outrageous. Is it? We all have to identify ourselves from time to time. The present truce is a consequence of successive football-ground catastrophes. At Heysel Stadium in Brussels, Liverpool ...”

“... this elementary point at the time, and later paid me back handsomely with a superb introduction to Margaret Thatcher, so I was depressed to find great tranches of his memoir taken up with pseudo-nostalgic poppycock about the virtues of white supremacy in Africa and elsewhere. The problem with his ridiculous and often hateful opinions – on Suez, on ...”

“... him – and an abject sinner. The rage of the novel’s males would be enough to put the wind up Margaret Thatcher if it weren’t so often the rage of those who believe themselves permanently beaten and cheated. The women are the vessels of a better spirit; the injury to them is greater, and it is from their own men that some of that injury has been ...”

“... bobs up all over the place in these pages, and David Steel gets a couple of footnotes, but Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, David Owen and Arthur Scargill make no appearance.) Mrs Castle was generally rated a highly effective departmental minister, and from these diaries one sees why. She had radical instincts, a good mind, a total dedication to ...”

“... to dissolve during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, an exercise in international piracy which even Margaret Thatcher felt obliged to condemn. Vanunu couldn’t understand why his new country – the country to which his parents had voluntarily emigrated from Morocco – should engage in such monstrous and gratuitous slaughter. This led him to ask more ...”

“... political line because in large social groups the breasts of Samantha Fox and the opinions of Margaret Thatcher combine effectively. Lord Beaverbrook, a loving, unfaithful husband who had women the way most people have buttered toast, kept the Express smutless, while he promoted only those politicians he either cared for or was in alliance with. And ...”

“... forced on Kew by the 1987 hurricane were minor compared to those which came in the train of ...”

“... lack of tact, her openness about her fantasies and prejudices (although a leftist, she preferred Margaret Thatcher to the usual feminist bunch). Or the ethico-political grounds – already, in 1954, she was describing the US as a ‘second Roman Empire’ – on which she based her decision to make her home in ‘old Europe’. As Frank Rich put it, she ...”

“... an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, and claimed anticipatory self-defence. The then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said: ‘Armed attack in such circumstances cannot be justified. It represents a grave breach of international law.’ The Security Council unanimously passed a Resolution damning the Israeli action as illegal – strong condemnation ...”

“... oligarchy to full democracy, and it did set standards that its critics can’t criticise. Even Margaret Thatcher admired its ‘Victorian ...”

“... breakthrough in 1979, a year of strikes, bombs, serial killers, high inflation and the election of Margaret Thatcher. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan felt like the beginning of the end of the world. As Savage says, ‘there was a sense – reinforced by the vacant, derelict inner cities – that the bomb had already dropped.’ We were nostalgic for ...”

“... they can hear his voice on the radio in the hotel bar below. He is present in this novel much as Margaret Thatcher is in The Ploughman’s Lunch – to root the story in the real. McEwan uses current affairs much as a rock band uses drums or a salesman uses a smile. The fact that Macmillan is still in power also helps us to be convinced by Florence’s ...”