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“... not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he couldn’t catch his glittering eye. There is only one passage in ...”

“... whole. The ten-volume Library Edition, first published in 1910 by Pater’s original publisher, Macmillan, had no critical apparatus. Oxford, where Pater spent virtually his entire career, might have been expected to fill the scholarly gap, but an attempt to bring out a critical edition foundered some time in the 1990s. Rumour attributes the failure to ...”

“... much. They’re so vulgar.’ The story illustrates the major problem of writing a biography about Margaret Thatcher: personally, she is neither nice nor interesting. She has immense energy, remarkable tenacity and stamina, and a good brain. But she has a shallow mind, little imagination and an immense, bullying ego. As she goes ramping on and on and on ...”

“... from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as they do. But she is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps ...”

“... than herself who was seeking consolation from a failed marriage to another blonde, also called Margaret. Lo, the grocer’s daughter became a millionairess. What Mrs Thatcher preaches is that we should all go out and make money by hard work: what she actually did herself was to marry money, give up paid work, hire others to work for her, and dedicate ...”

“... poems, entitled Gitanjali, with a prefatory essay by W.B. Yeats, had met with instant acclaim, and Macmillan were hurrying out successor volumes, including The Gardener. Scholars and critics continue to argue how far these ‘translations’ established his reputation or led to misrecognitions. Mary Lago’s Imperfect Encounter (1972) is one gate-of-entry into ...”

“... the astute politician can put the services of a well-nigh defenceless television service. Harold Macmillan, with his jaunty actor’s instinct, first perceived the possibilities. In turn, Mr Wilson portrayed the homely Northern pipeman preoccupied by larger concerns and James Callaghan faced the cameras with avuncular aplomb, but it is Mrs Thatcher who has ...”

“... overfond of aristocratic titles and the ceremonial and sartorial trappings that went with them (Margaret Thatcher once berated him for his trademark Homburg). His most famous bon mot was that, in sacking a third of his cabinet on the Night of the Long Knives, Harold Macmillan demonstrated the truth that ‘greater love ...”

“... Journalists who worked for Beaverbrook speak of him with a combination of awe and affection. James Macmillan and John Ellison, who were so much of the Daily Express for so long, describe this slow, mocking North American voice coming over the phone with approbation or a grumble and always creating a frisson. Both have said to me, ‘You would have liked ...”

“... similar figure who died in somewhat similar circumstances in 1952, would have frustrated Harold Macmillan in 1957’. What of Gladstone as Palmerston’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1860s? ‘It is reminiscent of the position in the Federal Republic of Germany a hundred years later when Ludwig Erhard’s economic management provided the essential ...”

“... Office, hiring and firing the party chairman at will. When a major cabinet crisis erupted under Macmillan, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer resigning in flat disagreement over economic policy, what was chiefly remembered – and admired – was Macmillan’s patrician dismissal of it as ‘a little local ...”

“... sing his songs with what this book enigmatically describes as ‘teddy bear gestures’. Harold Macmillan could do a superb impersonation of the languid patrician he actually was, while Harold Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as ...”

“... His hero reached his conclusion all by himself, he insists. On the other hand, he didn’t tell Margaret about his conversion. If he had, says Anderson, ‘she would have lost all faith in his judgment of foreign affairs, and in her own favourable assessment of his merits.’ But when Mr Major returned to the Treasury as Chancellor, this time stepping over ...”

“... American resources and broader American minds, and getting himself posted to the Eisenhower-Macmillan joint command in North Africa. He also developed, according to Howard, a marked preference for the active-service officer over ‘the trained diplomats or elected politicians with whom he had been accustomed to deal in London’. After the war, though ...”

“... the way of business or horse-racing should distress nobody. She has no need to be impressed by ‘Margaret Drabble and other highbrows’ at informal Buckingham Palace luncheons. The monarch’s business is with practice and not with theory. It is we who have to get our ideas straight. The notion of a ‘royal biography’ is itself part of the kit of ...”