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“... remains oddly unabashed, convinced that it was a glorious victory – but then Mrs Thatcher and Nigel Lawson believe they have done great things for the British economy, so he is hardly the only public figure to suffer such delusions. MacGregor’s memoirs are persuasive in one crucial respect. They lend no support at all to the idea that the NUM was ‘set ...”

“... the crucial brief was written by two young welfare radicals, Richard Titmuss and Brian Abel-Smith. He also set up the first committee to investigate the effects of smoking: both the Treasury and Lord Salisbury wanted to suppress its Report and Macleod, anxious to placate such powerful colleagues, chain-smoked his way through the press conference ...”

“... to herself as ‘head of state’ and talking of ‘I, as a government’. Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson may have fulminated against her, in the course of reviewing this book, but they helped launch the good ship Thatcher and sailed in her fatly for many a year, long sustaining and defending her against those who objected from the outset to government ...”

“... True satiation. It seems so simple. Probably as simple as infinity and the universe.Unlike Patti Smith, her fellow New York rocker and ancient rival, Harry doesn’t do hallucinatory chats with dead lovers and a motel sign (‘Thank you, Dream Motel, I said … It’s the Dream Inn! the sign exclaimed’), or stud her text with dingy photos of chairs and ...”

“... from all the paladins of the Tory right: Roger Scruton, Andrew Roberts, Simon Heffer, Iain Duncan Smith. His stream of long, considered speeches continued to ripple through Tory minds, all the more perhaps because they were now running underground. During his wilderness years Powell became the Baptist of the Brexit movement. Puffing a book entitled Enoch Was ...”

“... a customer, a purchaser – everything but a citizen. Even so, the boom of the late Eighties which Nigel Lawson let rip (and which was once called an economic miracle) was defended on ‘productionist’ grounds, though only one thing was clear about the boom: that the British economy, far from being transformed, did not have the productive capacity to sustain ...”

“... and the Secret State, a conspiracy to silence Carmen St Keeldare. A leaked transcript from Smith Square disguised as a Derek Raymond ‘Factory’ thriller. ‘Chapter by chapter – an embodiment, lock, stock and barrel, of the next Tory manifesto. Almost every sickly hypocritical promise and lie had been injected, like an infection, into the text of ...”

“... I can. It’s not my sort of book at all, but it leaves me wanting to read his other books. Zadie Smith thinks it a masterpiece and says so on the cover. Certainly it’s a new way of writing a novel.25 May, Yorkshire. To Leeds this morning in an empty train with neither of us feeling very clever but revived by a lovely lunch at Sous le Nez in Leeds, mine ...”

“... in her search for new ideas she could bring to the fight. She read heavyweight books – Adam Smith, Burke, Popper, Hayek – and carefully noted their contents. She enjoyed talking about these writers when she got the chance. But did she really understand them? One of the questions that has always dogged Thatcher is whether she was intellectually ...”

“... where he was reunited with his mother. The following day, a Sunderland Echo reporter called Nigel Green drove Heron from the monastery to Morpeth railway station. ‘He was terrified of being recognised,’ Green told me. ‘I bought him a baseball cap and put him on a train to Scotland.’ Green took a photograph before he left: there are blurred ...”

“... to benefit.It was not long before any such linear prospect was in trouble. At the Treasury, Nigel Lawson had pressed for British entry into the Community’s Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1985, and when Thatcher vetoed this, shadowed it nonetheless. By 1989 the economy – pumped up by Lawson to secure Thatcher’s third electoral victory in 1987 ...”

“... about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the ...”