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“... York’s good fairy – the one with the magic wand, or the dividing rod – was of course Margaret Thatcher. In a little bit of trickery quite dazzling in its confusions, York sets out to equate the Thatcher ‘peasant revolt’ – the revolt against high-table paternalism by a winsome band of ‘clever ...”

“... a semi house-trained polecat. The army of rats has now been joined by Lord McAlpine of West Green, Thatcher’s ‘jolly bagman’, as he calls himself. Margaret Thatcher’s affection for the British construction industry was legendary. She loved the world of quick profits from government contracts, and for all her ...”

“... lurking allegory glares out at us a bit too nakedly. Shand and his ambitions belong to the early Thatcher years, gangsters and entrepreneurs have similar economic goals and plans for development. Nationalism, as distinct from nationalisation, is far from dead. It’s an echo of the old analogy between crime and business, still good for a rant if nothing ...”

“... or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to 1914. The contrast is not so much between an era of greatness and an era of decline ...”

“... governments since 1979 have pursued or maintained some of the neoliberal policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher. While economic growth in the UK had been lower than in most other G7 countries before 1979, during the Thatcher, Major and Blair administrations it caught up or lifted higher. Perhaps as a result, many ...”

“... his death. ‘He loved the old smells of lead and ink.’ But what spare love he had, after loving Margaret Thatcher, was kept for a version of Britain in which the natural condition was to be white and born here, in which the unemployed were scroungers and the rich (or some of them) were heroes, where single mothers were letting the side down and ...”

“... incumbent to rely on inertia in seeing off a serious challenger. This was the system which allowed Thatcher to snatch the leadership from Heath in 1975 and Heseltine to knock out Thatcher in 1990, to the ultimate advantage of Major. It signalled a change not just in the rules but in the code. Neither Heath nor ...”

“... occasionally offers little emblematic hints on interpretation, a camera for Cecil Beaton, and, for Margaret Thatcher, a ‘No Milk Today’ tag hanging from her nipple. Bernard Levin, who alone appears twice in the book, is once parked under the bosom of Arianna Stassinopoulos. Marcia Falkender holds the PM, a ventriloquist’s dummy, on her knee. Tom ...”

“... point for Churchill’s image and for figurative sculpture. The banality of Anthony Dufort’s Margaret Thatcher of 2007, which stands opposite Churchill in the lobby and which MPs are not allowed to touch in case they damage it, demonstrates the sharp decline. Attitudes to Churchill have also shifted. The hostility of the 1960s is palpable in Gerald ...”

“... ministerial proponents, besides Salisbury, were Stanley Baldwin (1923-24, 1924-29, 1935-37) and Margaret Thatcher (1979-90), who shared his knack for condensing a political philosophy into a simple (and simplifying) phrase, as well as his ability rhetorically to align the interests of the nation with the interests of capital. It’s still possible to ...”

“... while I was a girl was a thirst for knowledge about politics and public affairs,’ Baroness Thatcher tells us in The Path to Power, thus confirming the centrality of Councillor (later Alderman) Roberts as the inspiration behind a political career which resulted in the longest premiership of this century. The story of that premiership, of course, was ...”

“... when shed by a notorious tough nut, such as Oliver Cromwell, Lord Eldon, Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher. The Protector was repeatedly denounced for his ostentatious pretences of piety and feeling: he was ‘fluent in his tears’, endowed with ‘spungy eyes and a supple conscience’. In The Masque of Anarchy, Shelley sneers at Lord ...”

“... criticism of the state bureaucracy over the past twenty years has come from people – like Margaret Thatcher – who felt excluded from it, or patronised by it, on grounds of class. Her revenge on the whole Civil Service was diabolical. Bonding is not very useful if it leaves the unbonded – especially the powerful unbonded – feeling so ...”

“... maligned decade meant that despite cutbacks in healthcare and public services in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, by 1991 women were living to 79 and men to 73. Four years each, achieved in twenty years. Over the next twenty years, men caught up a little with women: since more men smoked there were more male smokers who could give up. By 2011 women ...”

“... fat fee by Paul Johnson, former editor of the New Statesman and later chief jester at the court of Margaret Thatcher. Laurie Flynn tells us that Johnson managed to complete his panegyric without a single interview with a migrant miner. Nor did he mention ‘the migrant labour system, low wages, anti-union attitudes, poor food, bad housing, inadequate ...”