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“... disempowering county and city government, long the power base of the Tories’ electoral strength, Margaret Thatcher did likewise. She told her own party activists that they were not wanted and knocked from under her the support of local power and patronage that was the essence of a mass party. Thus, under leaders of both parties since 1979, the poor ...”

“... is raised that the sturdily ineloquent mill-owner Mr Thornton can rise to the rhetorical level of Margaret Hale: I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit . . . We hate to have laws made for us at a distance. We wish people would allow us ...”

“... figure was Antony Armstrong-Jones, the commoner (and photographer) whose engagement to Princess Margaret caused a stir in 1960, and who liked to wear jeans rather than his old Etonian tie. That year, Armstrong-Jones singlehandedly transformed the dress code of stylish London restaurants when he arrived at the Trattoria Terrazza in a rollneck – and was ...”

“... like Peter Walker, barely note its existence in their memoirs; and in The Downing Street Years Margaret Thatcher has nothing to say on the matter beyond a reference to the privatisation of ‘Britoil (a nationalised North Sea exploration and production company set up by Labour in 1975)’. This is odd not only because the Britoil privatisation was the ...”

“... consensus will not have brought mankind to its senses? Meanwhile perhaps we should be grateful to Margaret Thatcher for having won a majority large enough to give her opponents plenty of time for second thoughts. No doubt a few individuals will break away from the party as they have done in the past, either to plough a lonely furrow of independence, like ...”

“... main nightly news bulletins – priceless moments of political prime time which show Kinnock up or Thatcher down or Owen playing prime minister for a day. And built around those images come ideas and patterns to be repeated through the political year, whether true or false – a seasonal yield of misty perceptions which are all we know of political ...”

“... whose life touched many bases. A Second World War veteran who became a close friend and ally of Margaret Thatcher, he was killed by Irish republicans when a bomb attached to his car exploded as he left the underground car park at the Palace of Westminster. Speaking to the Media Society in 1977, Neave had pitched his idea for a ‘Belfast Starsky and ...”

“... When​ Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university sector ...”

“... know. They prefer to avert their gaze, reminding the reader of the sketch in Spitting Image when Margaret Thatcher dines with members of her cabinet: Waitress: ‘Would you like to order, Sir?’ Thatcher: ‘Yes, I will have a steak.’ Waitress: ‘How’d you like it?’ ...”

“... a professor of paediatric medicine at Bristol University, contrived to drop a cup of coffee at Margaret Thatcher’s feet. He stooped down to mop it up, then sprang up and asked her for money. ‘I’m Professor Butler,’ he’s reported to have said. ‘We’re doing a national study looking at thousands of children. We need more funding!’ She ...”

“... superhuman job’.Women were banned from working underground by the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act. Margaret Hedley’s account of her great-grandmother’s married life in the first decades of the 20th century illuminates the conditions faced by women in pit villages. Susan Jopling gave birth to five daughters in a tied cottage in Ludworth in County ...”

“... Irish claim of century-long over-taxation and for the Irish demand, so eerily similar to that of Margaret Thatcher in relation to the European Community almost a century later, to ‘get its money back’. Political historians recognise the significance of the impact upon nationalist opinion of the Report of this Commission. What seems to have been less ...”

“... Isherwood on the left of the group portrait with Spender and Auden in Rügen? He cites the pair of Margaret Thatcher and D.H. Lawrence as Larkin’s main men, refers to the ‘crappy brainwaves’ of Spurs chairman Irving Scholar and the ‘uncolourful speech’ of Andrew Motion, putting me immediately in mind of the ‘brown teapot’ in his Arvon ...”

“... Reece and Saatchi and Saatchi. The only surprise is that in this context the prime minister whom Margaret Thatcher most closely resembles is Macmillan. Like him, she instinctively understood the importance of television; like him, she was not naturally good on the box; like him, she was prepared to work at it and to take advice; and like him, she has ...”

“... exposition like this?) Between the big players, people like Genscher and Kohl and Petra Kelly and Margaret Thatcher – who, thrillingly, appear as themselves – and the fictional characters, Polina Mertz and Richard Fisher, is an intermediate layer of lightly fictionalised or disguised or à clef types, Polk and Kurtsovsky (i.e. Nitze and ...”