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“... A few months alter the fall of Margaret Thatcher, the most original thinker of post-war Conservatism died. Perhaps partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the philosopher’s papers, without so much as mentioning his political ideas ...”

“... the time Robinson quit the national stage, Rees-Mogg was ten years old. Rees-Mogg’s adoration of Thatcher – ‘Perhaps the greatest peacetime leader of this country in the past one hundred years or more … there was a golden age when Baroness Thatcher was in charge … 1979, that hallowed year in which the great lady ...”

“... with the nearest thing the Party had to a piping hot Gladstonian internationalist, in the form of Margaret Thatcher. As Simms reminds us, she strode up and down at the edge of the fray, incandescent. ‘This is in the heart of Europe,’ she fumed down the telephone to the Mayor of Bihac in 1994, ‘and the lack of effective action has robbed Nato of its ...”

“... had been nationalised in 1977 and the Conservatives were itching to reprivatise it. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher won her second general election by a landslide and returned to power with a mission to destroy the trade unions. The Tories had been working out how to do this for a while. In 1977, a think-tank paper, the Ridley Plan, which was a response ...”

“... of Glasgow’. The worlds of the books are continuous – deprived Glasgow and its environs in the Thatcher years and after – but the characters are not, even if someone who is clearly Shuggie puts in a cameo appearance, asking Mungo Hamilton for advice outside a pawnbroker’s. (The boys are of an age: Shuggie is sixteen at the end of Shuggie Bain, Mungo ...”

“... about British war efforts became a national creed. Their most grotesque proponent was, of course, Margaret Thatcher, whom Patrick Wright once diagnosed as forever ‘redeclaring the Second World War’. Now, however, there is a growing unease about war memory in this country. Evident in last year’s arguments over the D-Day celebrations, it was evident ...”

“... Federal social spending. In Europe, it is associated with the triumph and continued victories of Margaret Thatcher and with shifts away from social-democratic control in a number of other regimes.1That claim of ‘crisis’ is, however, a very ambiguous one. Contemporary discussions, relying on unclear and often misunderstood terms and data, show that ...”

“... have begun perceptibly to change. The influence of the Plain English campaign, championed by Margaret Thatcher, has begun to be noticeable throughout Whitehall, and some truly simple legislation has started to appear. The Human Rights Bill, designed to bring the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law and now wending its way through ...”

“... that the Falklands War was a close-run thing, but gives a more or less positive assessment of Margaret Thatcher and Admiral Terence Lewin, as well as the British commanders in the field. (He doesn’t mention the fact that the Royal Navy deployed ships with nuclear weapons to the theatre against Foreign Office advice.) He praises the productive ...”

“... the Duchess of Windsor in a triple-pearl choker, Dorothy Sayers in a mannish coat and tie or Margaret Thatcher in high pie-crust frills, send messages about power rather than vulnerability. One of the most striking portraits in the book juxtaposes two images of female exposure and protection. Dame Laura Knight’s self-portrait of 1913 shows the ...”

“... and having written biographies of Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Rosalind Franklin, Nora Joyce and Margaret Thatcher, she knows how to give a logic to a life. Like many of Freud’s first disciples, Jones, she suggests, was drawn to psychoanalysis because it offered him the chance to correct, as he put it in a letter to his mentor, ‘various wrong ...”

“... particular whims and inclinations, and by stamping on rivals who may be getting above themselves. Margaret Thatcher was such a prime minister, but so too was Edward Heath, perhaps to an even greater extent (Heath’s cabinet was composed almost entirely of admirers and minions), which goes to show that dominance does not automatically translate into ...”

“... and the ‘family’, shimmying back and forth between the two as political expediency demanded. Margaret Thatcher made the conflation explicit in her notorious claim in 1987: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’ Cooper quotes Milton and Rose Friedman, who were ostensibly ...”

“... more ‘family-friendly’ experience. But the broader ideological terrain had already been set by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: socialism and the organised working class had been defeated, their political threat neutered. In 1994, the year of Loaded’s first issue and Oasis’s first album, Tony Blair took over the Labour Party and immediately ...”

“... which he gnawed loudly, often controversially. In 1989 he disparaged Hugo Young’s biography of Thatcher, in a piece of rhetorical brilliance about the profligacy of Thatcherism. In 1990 he sneered at Raymond Williams as a kindly old fellow from the valleys. In 1999, he savaged an authorised biography of Mandela, creating a stir on the letters page by ...”