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“... insular myth worries Warner, who shows how effectively it was employed by Churchill, and later by Thatcher during the Falklands war. As Warner points out, England has always been strongly related to other countries; her very survival has depended – especially during World War Two – on continuous relations with ports and products overseas. Churchill’s ...”

“... Labour Party cherishes its great partnerships – Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Douglas and Margaret Cole, the Callaghans, the Kinnocks, the Blairs. In this pantheon the touchingly loyal team of Michael and Jill may confidently be placed.’ ‘Michael and Jill’: how cosy. It seems unfair to bracket Glenys Kinnock, say, with Beatrice Webb and ...”

“... better: in each case a passport to more than a decade in power. Much the same could be said of the Thatcher era. By taking office in 1979, the Conservatives got their hands on North Sea oil to back their great gamble in economic policy. They also had, of course, the bonus of a divided opposition, with both the Labour Party and the Liberal-SDP Alliance ...”

“... quoted by Hunter, ‘is a quarrier, mason, woodman, carrier … carpenter, cooper, turf-cutter, thatcher … farmer, cattle dealer, poacher and God knows what.’ Such indeed was the variety of skills that supported life before the factory system and which was now to be systematically and explicitly done away with. In a croft house a few miles from the ...”

“... the passionate Rosine flees in her lionlike robe, an opposed figure is brought into focus. This is Margaret, a phosphorescent product of the mass media whose ‘severed head’ (‘repeated, televised, pearlised’) parodies and usurps the presence of exiled Rosine. The conquest seems complete, for with the coming of ...”

“... expected – Anguilla on a wider stage, with penguins. Events which soon followed, ending with Mrs Thatcher taking the salute at a victory parade, have made it hard to remember why it all at first seemed so comic. But the early incredulity often made points which were lost when solemn passions took over. I remember an editorial conference, the Task Force ...”

“... Bennite Left under New Labour underlines the point: stalwarts from the early 1980s – Tony Banks, Margaret Beckett, Jeremy Corbyn, Michael Meacher, Clare Short, Gavin Strang – have been given only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their ...”

“... interests; it is a meeting of minds between types of statesman or stateswoman. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were self-consciously the last great leaders in the nation-state tradition, even though it was their regimes that broke the link between the state and welfare. George W. Bush and Tony Blair are ‘among the first market-state political ...”

“... elective leadership has successively elevated meritocratic, professional politicians – Heath, Thatcher and Major – who could never have ‘emerged’ from the old pre-elective system, and such politicians, lacking anything else to fall back on, do not quit gracefully. This means that every leadership election is an attempted regicide; and so the Tory ...”

“... too old to run for the job (55 was the limit).Journalists and other commentators have focused on Thatcher and Scargill when writing about Britain’s late coal age; Robert Gildea’s Backbone of the Nation is more interested in the experience of the miners: working underground; feeding and clothing a household; and, most of all, organising the dispute and ...”

“... end of an empire was obviated by Deng Xiaoping, who unveiled his radical sounding solution to Margaret Thatcher, on her visit to Beijing in September 1982: ‘one country, two systems, for at least fifty years.’ Mrs Thatcher later called it ‘an ingenious idea’. Deng Xiaoping claimed it as an improbable mix of ...”

“... TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video nasty. Young male novelists routinely seek to give maximum offence. Martin Amis did so in 1975 by calling a novel Dead Babies. In The Wasp Factory Banks recounted acts of child-on-child sadism ...”

“... Kinnock for the party leadership, despite the opposition of some members of the group, including Margaret Beckett and Chris Mullin. Benn describes himself as ‘peaceful in my own mind’ about this outcome because it had been a collective decision, not an act of personal vanity. Corbyn’s chairmanship of the group helped salve his conscience. Benn was less ...”

“... was introduced after the flotation of telephones, gas and water because it was, according to Thatcher, ‘the most technically and politically difficult privatisation’. The Government’s audacity in embarking on the electricity sell-off should not be underemphasised: this kind of project had not been tried in any other major industrialised ...”

“... a breach of Parliamentary privilege. Hamilton untied that knot at once. Supported by Lady Thatcher, Lord Archer and the entire Parliamentary Tory Party, he conspired to force through Parliament an amendment to the Defamation Act which allows MPs to waive their privilege in order to sue for libel. Backed by his new law, Hamilton charged back into court ...”