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“... of Diane Abbott. In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives to power under Margaret Thatcher – something Harman describes as an ‘excruciating blow’ – 19 women were elected, the lowest postwar figure aside from the 17 elected in 1951. Harman became the Labour parliamentary candidate for Peckham in 1982 and that summer got ...”

“... see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the local council (careful, no doubt, with its ratepayers’ money) has allowed an insurance company to take over and manage a large part of the town’s shopping centre. In the interests of ‘safety’, this company now patrols the area with security ...”

“... in the first half of the 20th century she might have added that another Somerville alumna, Margaret Thatcher, clearly earned that title in the century’s second half. No one can doubt the extent to which Thatcher stamped herself on the 1980s, but the effect of reading this fine biography is to make one ...”

“... of Harold Wilson’s victory in 1964. He ends in 1981 with the ‘drying-out of the wets’ by Mrs Thatcher in her autumn reshuffle. The underlying theme, if only a whisper in the reader’s ear, is plain enough: the erosion of the post-war state, the collapse of consensus politics, the descent of Labour into the abyss. Or to sum it all up – decline and ...”

“... sketching them, having discovered a talent for making likenesses. The Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Archbishop Makarios and Adolf Eichmann all sat for portraits. He was an invitee at all the fashionable parties, and a man who specialised in providing fun for his friends. Keeler met him when she was a showgirl and moved into his ...”

“... for Expansion, presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mrs Margaret Thatcher), December 1972. I do not think that irrevocable damage has yet been done, but I do regard the situation as alarming in the sense that the contribution made by Britain to world science will be severely reduced if the factors now operating ...”

“... a determined advocate in principle’) when it showed no sign of being thus qualified at the time. Margaret Thatcher, as Major points out, has been a great deal less honest. In 1985 she had forced through the Single European Act, which committed Britain to ‘progressive realisation of economic and monetary union’, but later decided that she had always ...”

“... the scene doesn’t become clear until page four, when the first of the main characters arrives: Margaret Thatcher, apparently a regular visitor to the park, now a ghost of her former self. The ‘heightened reality of the “Iron Lady”, scourge of the trade unions, victor of the Falklands War, the best man in the cabinet’ has dissipated. She ...”

“... Major was struggling to get his foot on the ladder – any ladder – at an age when Heath and Thatcher had already made good their escape by scrambling onto the upward escalator at Oxford University. Not until Major landed a job with the Standard Bank in 1966, aged 23, did his prospects start to improve. ‘I reckoned I could then save a hundred pounds a ...”

“... Whoever thought otherwise? The popular answer is that this was the general proposition asserted by Margaret Thatcher when she uttered this phrase – which, once uttered, she was never allowed to forget. Like many famous quotations, it has been snatched out of its original context. The fact is that in an interview with Woman’s Own in October 1987, ...”

“... Macmillan’s bloodstained reshuffle of 1963, the Night of the Long Knives (contrasted with Mrs Thatcher’s ten-year extravenous drip), with an airy flap of the wrist and one and a quarter pages. Such matters are unworthy, not to be bothered with. Like German culture, they rate a shrug and a giggle. But there are elements in this unsatisfactory book which ...”

“... of course a brutal snobbishness in this approach, as there had been in all the sneers about Mrs Thatcher’s origins. There was a danger too. By pushing the suburban-man assault too hard, Major’s critics ran the risk of confessing that they would much rather be governed by a toff. After all, to poke fun at Major’s dinginess was to poke fun at half of ...”

“... lack of genius or socialist principles, did much more than either Souter or Gloag for Stagecoach. Margaret Thatcher and her eager disciple Nicholas Ridley privatised the National Bus Company in 1985. The ‘thinking’ behind this measure came from organisations like the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. To the boffins there the ...”

“... the by the CIA at a cost of $400 million, an estimate Cooley thinks cannot be far from the mark. Margaret Thatcher rivalled Ronald Reagan in her enthusiasm for the jihad. She was especially well-disposed towards the CIA chief William Casey after the Falklands War, at one memorable moment of which US officials delivered much-coveted Stinger missiles ...”

“... with a decent and respected Conservative MP who is put in charge of Northern Ireland by Mrs Thatcher. Jeffrey Archer has brought real people into his novel, to mingle with his own creations. He treats all the real people, from the editor of the Daily Mirror to Sir Alec Douglas-Home (as he then was), with tact and courtesy. This makes life difficult for ...”