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“... the Western European welfare state was a harbinger of totalitarianism. These economists see Mrs Margaret Thatcher as the leading politician of contemporary times – a view which, at least until recently, was fashionable in all Soviet reform circles. Alec Nove, British Sovietology’s doyen, has noted that both Nikolai Petrakov, Gorbachev’s economic ...”

“... new policy’. They were also referred to as such on different occasions by Sir Geoffrey Howe, by Margaret Thatcher and by various government spokespersons. When Parliament was eventually let in on them in October 1985, it was in answer to a request for a ‘statement on the policy of Her Majesty’s Government governing the exportation of armaments to ...”

“... crowds. Raisa and he had already begun to travel: first to Italy and then to London, where he and Margaret Thatcher had famously hit it off (‘We can do business together’). But in Moscow he began his changes only slowly, uncertainly. Another rush of Taubman questions: why didn’t he launch a crash programme for consumer goods, why didn’t he go ...”

“... got the hang of Twitter, and now he feels that he was negligent in not doing so. He notes that Margaret Thatcher did all right without it – indeed, ‘the very idea that she could have contained her thoughts to 140 characters is preposterous. The Lady was not for tweeting. But I should have been.’ Really? Not only is the thought of Brown tweeting ...”

“... It’s one of a trio of British films (the others The Full Monty and Brassed Off) spawned by the Thatcher era which benefit from having such a clear-cut political situation and a ready-made villain – ‘Margaret Fucking Thatcher’ in Bill Nighy’s words – giving all three films the ...”

“... same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the GLC. One day, he had found himself taking the Underground in the ...”

“... if the car industry fails the Labour government will go with it (not that it won’t go anyway). Margaret Thatcher thrived on the effects of recession by positing them as the sad but unavoidable consequence of economic resolve and modernisation. Labour can’t use that vocabulary so easily. The names Dagenham and Longbridge have a haunting effect on the ...”

“... less like renaissance than the last gasp of pan-African romanticism, and is about as convincing as Margaret Thatcher sounded when she took to public prayer. Fassin would not agree. He sees it as a ‘refutation of the morbid ideology that is crushing Africa’. He requires us to suspend judgment, think more deeply, learn more, reflect critically, be ...”

“... High, the 32-year-old mayor set about turning the town into the kind of enterprise society that Margaret Thatcher used to extol. She abolished its building codes and signed a series of ordinances that re-zoned residential property for commercial and industrial use. When the city attorney ordered construction to stop on a house being built by one of her ...”

“... had (the Conservatives were returned to power in 1970 after six years of Labour government, and Margaret Thatcher became education secretary), there was little it could do, since local authorities were responsible for running schools.Since then, however, there has been a slow and determined clawing back of control by central government. First the new ...”

“... It was the end of a Cabinet meeting and Mrs Thatcher was cross. It was all so silly, so unnecessary. She was half-way through her second term as prime minister – a bad time for most governments, but hers was doing surprisingly well. Earlier in the year, the most dangerous of all the ‘enemies within’, the miners’ union, had been thoroughly beaten in a tough fight ...”

“... past ten years, it has acquired a further meaning. It can now mean someone who is opposed to Mrs Thatcher’s politics, and has been exposed to redundancy by her success. She is seen to have made them failures, or to have driven them off to higher salaries in America, and to have encouraged them to be snobs. Intellectuals are people who call her common or ...”

“... yields us a camped-up whodunnit. Flamboyant crimes and scandalous secrets marked the Thatcher epoch, just as they do the life of the novel’s voyeuristic, emotionally autistic narrator, Michael Owen, whose finger hovers constantly by the freeze-frame button as he drools over videos. The Thatcherite Eighties were all about emotionally retarded ...”

“... when international affairs are the arena of vanity par excellence. Another victim of it was Margaret Thatcher, ditched for neglecting her party while she affixed her signature to the Paris Charter. Her condolences to Gorbachev were more than fitting. It is no accident that the two most successful political machines of the postwar world, which in 45 ...”

“... appointing women to important positions than any of his predecessors, including his ultimate hero, Margaret Thatcher. He boasts that by the time he left office nearly half his special advisers were female. He resents the accusation that he was running a ‘chumocracy’, which is one reason Gove’s jibe about the Old Etonian coterie at Number 10 really ...”