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Brexit and Myths of Englishness

James Meek: For England and St George, 11 October 2018

“... a pagan pantheon apart from God – the queen, Churchill, James Bond, Bobby Moore, Sid Vicious, Margaret Thatcher; the miner, the Spitfire pilot, the NHS nurse – and sacred spaces, some famous, such as Wembley or Waterloo or Dunkirk, some idealised: the factory, the village, the rural airfield in 1941. Each summer, millions of people go to arts and ...”

The Framing of al-Megrahi

Gareth Peirce: The Death of Justice, 24 September 2009

“... the US president, George Bush Senior, was reported by the Washington Post as having spoken to Margaret Thatcher about Lockerbie, advising her to keep Lockerbie ‘low-key’, to avoid prejudicing negotiations with Syrian and Iranian-backed groups holding Western hostages in Lebanon. There were no arrests; Channon left the cabinet; and political ...”

The Last London

Iain Sinclair, 30 March 2017

“... for himself. That lurch into apocalyptic comic strip, peopled by grotesques, began around the Thatcher period; that was the beginning of my last London. Of course, there have been many last Londons. London stalls, revives, suffers and renews itself all the time; but now I anticipate an endgame for the kind of writing with which I have been associated. I ...”

Hayek and His Overcoat

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 October 1998

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations 
by David Landes.
Little, Brown, 650 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 316 90867 3Show More
The Commanding Heights 
by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw.
Simon and Schuster, 457 pp., £18.99, February 1998, 0 684 82975 4Show More
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“... the conventional case for the middle way at the Conservative Research Department in the Seventies, Margaret Thatcher pulled out a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. ‘This,’ she proclaimed, ‘is what we believe.’ (The now elderly economist was in turn much affected by his disciple. Asked for his impressions on meeting her, he was, as ...”

Dummy and Biffy

Noël Annan, 17 October 1985

Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community 
by Christopher Andrew.
Heinemann, 616 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 434 02110 5Show More
The Secret Generation 
by John Gardner.
Heinemann, 453 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 0 434 28250 2Show More
Two Thyrds 
by Bertie Denham.
Ross Anderson Publications, 292 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 86360 006 9Show More
The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany 1933-1939 
by Wesley Wark.
Tauris, 304 pp., £19.50, October 1985, 1 85043 014 4Show More
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“... to work happily. A prime minister should get to know his secret service chiefs. Churchill and Margaret Thatcher did, Harold Wilson confessed he scarcely knew them by sight. Churchill was one of the rare politicians who understood the value of intelligence. He quoted intercepts to the Chiefs of Staff and got them in the end to organise the Joint ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... in both countries. The remarkable growth of the pro-independence movement is the result of Thatcher’s dismantling of the welfare state and Blair-Brown’s admiration for the same. Until then the Scots had been prepared to stick to Labour regardless of the corruption and chicanery that categorised its party machine in Scotland. No longer. When large ...”

Diary

Hilary Mantel: Meeting the Devil, 4 November 2010

“... bedevilled me for years. Take just one example: the unwritten story called ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’. I had seen it all, years ago: the date and place, the gunman, the bedroom behind him, the window, the light, the angle of the shot. But my problem had always been, how did the ArmaLite get in the wardrobe? Now I saw that it just grew ...”

‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

“... from Queens: “Can you believe what I am getting?”’ (One wonders who those top women were: Margaret Thatcher? Simone de Beauvoir? Mother Teresa?) His self-aggrandisement is so unbounded, his persona has eaten his person. He routinely refers to himself as ‘Trump’ or ‘Mr Trump’ and even his family members at the convention struggled to come ...”

No Exit

David Runciman, 23 May 1996

The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain 
edited by S.J.D. Green and R.C. Whiting.
Cambridge, 403 pp., £40, February 1996, 0 521 45537 5Show More
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“... has not gone unchallenged. Many people doubted at the time, and continue to doubt, the purity of Margaret Thatcher’s motives, and of her crusade, strewn as it has been with incidental casualties. Many others have questioned whether history is ever this simple, whether the state really did grow as steadily, and contract as rapidly, as the Thatcherites ...”

Lunch

Jon Halliday, 2 June 1983

In the Service of the Peacock Throne: The Diaries of the Shah’s Last Ambassador to London 
by Parviz Radji.
Hamish Hamilton, 343 pp., £12.50, April 1983, 0 241 10960 4Show More
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“... Gate proffering advice – and sometimes tipping Radji off by phone about trouble ahead. As Mrs Thatcher tries to speed Britain into joining the ‘newly submerging countries’ it is useful to have so sharp and yet so complicit a description of our vulnerability. Radji records only one person who refused his hospitality: Philip Roth (though there were ...”

‘We’ve messed up, boys’

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Bad Blood, 16 November 2023

The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood 
by Cara McGoogan.
Viking, 396 pp., £20, September 2023, 978 0 241 62750 1Show More
Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal 
by Caroline Wheeler.
Headline, 390 pp., £22, September 2023, 978 1 0354 0524 4Show More
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“... was entirely unknown; new protocols were introduced once the dangers became clear. According to Margaret Thatcher, ‘all patients received the best treatment available in light of the medical knowledge at the time.’ These claims were not true.In​ 1970, Richard Titmuss celebrated Britain’s tradition of voluntary blood donation in The Gift ...”

Diary

Tobias Jones: Campaigning at the Ministry of Sound, 6 March 1997

“... and the Daily Mail, covert encouragement has been whispered to the cynical, alienated children of Thatcher; those born in the Seventies, who have only ever been aware of a Tory government, and who are about to vote for the first time; those disengaged from the world of party politics since 1989, when they fell off the electoral register rather than pay the ...”

Thatcherism

Gordon Brown, 2 February 1989

Thatcherism 
edited by Robert Skidelsky.
Chatto, 214 pp., £18, November 1988, 0 7011 3342 2Show More
The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left 
by Stuart Hall.
Verso, 283 pp., £24.95, December 1988, 0 86091 199 3Show More
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“... seen variously by admirers and by the less convinced in terms of both style and ideology. Mrs Thatcher’s personal style is a subject on which detached views are unusual, but a broad description is possible: naturally combative, dominance-orientated, rejecting compromise on principle, practising conviction politics with missionary zeal at governess ...”

What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8Show More
Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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“... John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC coverage of Northern Ireland.) By the time of her 1983 ...”

The Public Voice of Women

Mary Beard, 20 March 2014

“... Forum or ‘Elizabeth’ at Tilbury – consciously aping aspects of male rhetoric. That was what Margaret Thatcher did when she took voice training specifically to lower her voice, to add the tone of authority that her advisers thought her high pitch lacked. And that’s fine, in a way, if it works, but all tactics of that type tend to leave women still ...”

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