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“... take full advantage of the aces which it was dealt – most crucially, the Falklands card. Part of Margaret Thatcher’s luck in politics was the sort of luck which she made for herself, by snatching with both hands the opportunities which she was unexpectedly offered. At least in this respect, she proved herself a worthy heir to one of the finest traditions ...”

“... In private he was a nonconformist, living in a cabin in the Virginia backwoods with his wife, Margaret, who had grown up among Presbyterian missionaries.As chief of the newly constituted Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff, Gottlieb set about expanding and refining Dulles’s programme. The trials on ‘expendables’, in his estimation, had ...”

“... and truth’. This is baloney of the order once spoken by the mendacious Jonathan Aitken. Rolf Harris, an ignorant nation’s best-known painter, soon to become the people’s paedophile, was commissioned by the BBC to make a Bayswater Road portrait of the queen for her eightieth birthday. Lucian Freud’s 2001 portrait is, on the other hand, simply a ...”

“... to a lethal climax in the Great Purges of 1937-38 is told in two versions. One, proposed by James Harris some years ago in his book The Great Urals, focuses on central pressure on the regions to meet high production targets, leading the regions to take defensive action, enforcing a united front (which included the local police chief) under the regional first ...”

“... and Tide, the feminist magazine that published Delafield, first appeared. Its proprietor, Lady Margaret Rhondda, a peeress in her own right, campaigned energetically, albeit unsuccessfully, to be allowed to take her seat in the House of Lords. Hilda Matheson was 32 in 1920 and newly appointed political secretary to Nancy Astor. She appears on the cover of ...”

“... in Oxford, they enjoyed the services of a ‘cook, parlourmaid, gardener (Mondays), plus Mrs Harris for mending and extra cleaning, and Mrs Massey, laundress’. Rosalind’s parents, the Murrays, lived on a grander scale until social change drastically reduced the numbers in domestic service in the 1940s and 1950s. The Murrays took in refugees at the ...”

“... or a question of interpretation, or a misleading claim, but a lie. It ignores the rebate Margaret Thatcher negotiated. When you factor that in, the EU actually ‘takes’ about £250 million a week from Britain. Deepening the dishonesty of the original lie, even that figure overstates Britain’s contribution by more than half, because the EU gives ...”

“... seemed to agree on the semiotic message given out by Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who appeared in Nancy Reaganesque red suits, blue eyeshadow and false eyelashes, and was roasted by the American press, with one especially cruel review from Robin Givhan in the Washington Post: ‘She took fashion – which speaks in riddles, hyperbole ...”

“... I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not invented, were surely concealed like the author himself under ...”

“... the saints, to the cautionary lives of the rich and addicted. The anthropology of Malinowski and Margaret Mead was another crucial inspiration, for their vision of alternative social arrangements (and sexual freedom) provided passionate support for culture over nature, for social conditioning over biological destiny. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which had ...”

“... afford it. You see, if we don’t rehearse, and if we don’t-a play, that runs into money. Margaret Dumont, most imperturbable of straight men, was the aristocratic foil to all the boys in Animal Crackers, and when the circus of Harpo reeled around her, or poked her with a stick, or got his foot caught in her sleeve, Dumont’s suffering was ...”

“... ten in the pipeline (including Golden Hillock and another Trojan Horse school, Oldknow), and Harris, which has 36 academies and another four on the way. A less successful chain is E-Act, which had 31 academies in 2013. Last year, Ofsted inspected 16 of its schools and found that ‘an overwhelming proportion of pupils … were not receiving a good ...”

“... on Arran, hull 802 working the so-called ‘Uig triangle’, from Uig on Skye to the islands of Harris and North Uist. The ferries were part of the Scottish government’s plan to reduce the average age of the ten largest vessels in the CalMac fleet (which has thirty ships in total) from 21 years in 2017 to 12 years by 2025, and thus to improve ...”

“... faced in forcing European and American leaders to impose sanctions when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sympathised with the Pretoria regime. Walter’s attribution of the fall of apartheid to pity, white-collar public outrage, elite wisdom, capitalist pragmatism and demographic determinism is odd in a book about civil war. Her text struggles to ...”

“... seem beyond belief.As in his wonderful Ma’am Darling (a collagist’s journey around Princess Margaret), Brown deploys seemingly throwaway footnotes as peepholes into history. All the expected players are here – Bob Dylan, the Stones, Phil Spector – but also the Duchess of Windsor, Noël Coward, Peter Stringfellow, Malcolm Sargent, Beryl ...”