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“... on video by the Commission for Racial Equality. Here, in terms that the likes of Geoffrey Howe and Norman Tebbit found inflammatory, Rushdie revives the ‘two nations’ trope to describe the position of blacks and Asians as ghettoised, second-class citizens within British society. This theme was taken up in The Satanic Verses with its barely noticed ...”

“... Houses of Parliament. It makes me wonder what Yeats and Burne Jones would have said had they seen Norman Tebbit under the ruins of the Grand Hotel. For Yeats, ‘good earth power’ is the force which inspires what he terms ‘sound national doctrine’. That doctrinal force is to be felt in political speeches and is to be inculcated by printed texts ...”

“... I write, the national dailies contain just one true specimen between them. In the Daily Telegraph, Norman Tebbit appears as a crazed, bloodthirsty infantryman, with Douglas Hurd and Peter Walker mounted behind him, apparently duetting the Iron Duke’s quip: ‘I don’t know what effect he will have upon the enemy, but, by God, he terrifies ...”

“... with the grossly unreconstructed interventions at the recent Conservative Party Conference by Norman Tebbit. Although most of his major works are out of print, Carlyle’s letters, and those of his wife Jane, are in the process of being edited and published. It is a massive task, but they are among the finest literary letters of the century and the ...”

“... the Thatcher Government for allowing them to use British bases. Then it defended the BBC against Norman Tebbit’s criticism of its coverage of the attack on Libya, something that would be inconceivable in today’s Telegraph. The paper abandoned its long-standing support for the Nationalist Government and its apartheid policy in South Africa, and ...”

“... of the Government trying to wriggle out of any responsibility is especially interesting. (Norman Tebbit cuts an unedifying figure in both this and the Lloyd’s book.) The Barlow Clowes investors cleverly organised themselves into a political lobby, keeping up the pressure on their constituency MPs, who then kept up the pressure on the ...”

“... one exemplary indication of the pressures that he was likely to encounter under constant exposure. Norman Tebbit – even then adept at formulating the relevant test to apply and the right euphemism in which to cloak it – had already said that what Joseph lacked was ‘that indefinable quality that makes a national political leader’. In short, the ...”

“... thinking drove Thatcher through the vicious recession of the early 1980s. It was encapsulated by Norman Tebbit in his conference speech in 1981, often misquoted: ‘I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.’ That would imply that economic hardship ...”

“... the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbit. It turns out that none of the punk parasites much liked the sounds or the bands who produced them. They were career anarchists, varnishing their leather armour while they waited for an offer from the Daily Mail. Essentially, NME ‘new ...”

“... tells EU: it’s war.’ ‘There’s been nothing like it since the Falklands,’ crowed Norman Tebbit on his weekly page. Much anti-foreigner fun was had in Wapping: burn German flags, quote Churchill to German tourists. Major was portrayed in Beefeater costume; the paper offered posters, car suckers, free beefburgers. ‘Steer we go steer we ...”

“... had eaten into union membership and self-confidence. In late 1981 she made her move, appointing Norman Tebbit as employment secretary. Tebbit believed, as many Conservatives always have, that unions should be subservient organisations: ‘Their prime role,’ he lectured Len Murray, the general secretary of the ...”

“... position. It was natural, too, that within the Cabinet Mrs Thatcher should promote the likes of Norman Tebbit. Young writes of Tebbit’s scorn both for the Left, ‘for the well-heeled whigs personified by Roy Jenkins, whom he considered to have been the agents of national corruption’, and for ‘the Old ...”

“... its relations with the universities to an unnecessary degree. I am reminded of sitting next to Norman Tebbit at a Chamber of Shipping dinner in the Eighties when he assured me that the universities ‘have let down the country’. I asked Tebbit if he wanted my college, which has a famously imposing roll-call of ...”

“... concern for the disadvantaged has not exactly endeared him to the Conservative Central Office. As Norman Tebbit replied, in words reminiscent of Walter Bagehot, it is not surprising that the Prince is so sympathetic towards the unemployed: he is by way of being one of them himself. All this is indicative of a deeper change in perceptions of royalty that ...”

“... that read G.M. Trevelyan or the old Pelican History simply by trying harder is reminiscent of Norman Tebbit on the unemployed or Mrs Shephard on state education – wishful thinking (and ahistorical). Revealingly, the old Pelican series, which Cannadine himself describes as exemplary, observed what was then a well-established convention whereby ...”