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“... may beg to differ. The early recordings are painfully stagey. The first, from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant ...”

“... cut-the-welfare-bills ‘Labour’ Government whose leader is said to be a serious admirer of Margaret Thatcher? (‘Third Way’? It’s just the sensible, well-tried electoral trick of stealing your opponent’s clothes.) Stephen has recently seen John Redwood, who has so far recovered from post-electoral stress disorder as to be predicting that ...”

“... Denis Thatcher is entirely inventable – as John Wells understood: he comes in a flat pack with easy-to-follow instructions, all the components familiar general shapes, all parts from stock, no odd angles, no imagination required. When they came up with the idea for Ikea, they used Denis Thatcher as the prototype ...”

“... leaders in this period emerge as who they were rather than as what they did. The main exception is Margaret Thatcher, who gets a page about her character and background – much more than De Gaulle, Willy Brandt or Khrushchev. This is curious for several reasons. First of all, because Judt does not like Thatcher, giving ...”

“... was publicly exposed in 1979, during which year the Queen revoked his knighthood and he voted for Margaret Thatcher. Blunt is the enigmatist’s enigma. The English imagination has responded strongly to this compounding of spycraft, scholarship, homosexual intrigue and royal scandal. Blunt’s 1979 exposure and his death in 1983 occasioned books, plays ...”

“... had ‘next to no impact’. Grammar, as well as decency, caused arguments. Lord Hailsham wrote to Margaret Thatcher: ‘I am convinced there must be some limit to vulgarity! Could they not use the literate “sexual intercourse”? If that is thought to be too narrow, then why not “sexual relations” or “physical practices”, but not ...”

“... be defended, and returned to their homes, frustrated but resigned. Some Western leaders, not least Margaret Thatcher, were hoping in vain for such a demonstration of Soviet firmness. So why did Gorbachev and his colleagues choose to stay on the sidelines? Why did they not even play the ‘German card’, as some of their close advisers urged, to woo West ...”

“... couple of years ago. His favourite food as a teenager (McDonald’s), his role models (Bill Gates, Margaret Thatcher), his jargon (Key Performance Indicators), the entertainers he picked for private parties (Pitbull and PSY), his choice of intimidation techniques (an envelope with a bullet in it), the video games he liked (Age of Empires and Call of ...”

“... And the Widow is still in charge. Who could have guessed, when Downriver went to press, that Margaret Thatcher would have resigned by publication date? Not Sinclair. When he appears in the third person in the final story, he babbles ‘some bravado sub-text about considering his book a failure if the Widow clung on to power one year after its ...”

“... condition of her sex. As for parallels recently drawn between Elizabeth’s character and that of Margaret Thatcher, they have rarely been flattering to either. Dobson and Watson tell this story adroitly, interweaving it with that different but concurrent phenomenon: Elizabeth fictionalised as a love-lorn and unhappy woman compelled to sacrifice her ...”

“... salon and theatre’. Not many former Tory leaders can produce chunks of sociology like that. Margaret Thatcher might have found it politically unsound. There are ideological reasons why Major’s music-hall background is less improbable than it seems. It was, after all, a deeply conservative institution. As he puts it, it was ...”

“... have given way to a brutal right-wing backlash. As John Paul came into power, so too did Margaret Thatcher, who when asked what the New Testament meant to her, replied ‘freedom of choice’. There are many acolytes of John Paul who would reply ‘chastity, abstinence and ...”

“... Arabs and Vietnamese, and also about their wives, and women in general, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher.’ He found this ‘phoney, oppressive and grotesque – “like Buñuel”, as he put it once we had made our excuses and left’. And yet, it’s hard not to feel that his hosts were demonstrating exactly the point he kept trying to ...”

“... Prizewinner in economics but by an Oxford chemistry graduate with a second-class degree called Margaret Thatcher. Until the 1983 election it was virtually the unanimous wisdom of economists that no UK government could be re-elected with unemployment standing at over a million. Mrs Thatcher showed them what they ...”

“... and our liberty.1 The decisions about nuclear weapons which are currently on the agenda of the Thatcher Government have awesome implications for British society. Yet large sections of the intellectual establishment treat them with what Daniel Moynihan once described as ‘benign neglect’. In this respect, Britain is radically different from some of her ...”