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“... Mrs Thatcher, like Hedda Gabler, thinks of herself as her father’s daughter. For a hero, Alderman Roberts may be lacking in style. ‘A cautious, thrifty fellow’ is how Hugo Young describes him and it’s easy to tell he isn’t impressed. But Alfred Roberts was an imposing figure in Grantham and his businesses worked at a time when a great many failed ...”

“... early in life, it might lead anywhere. Look what happened to the daughter of Councillor Alfred Roberts of Grantham. ‘Perhaps the main interest which my father and I shared 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 ...”

“... to English Literature: no Gerald Kersh, Kyril Bonfiglioli, M. John Harrison, James Sallis, Keith Roberts, Derek Raymond, Harlan Ellison. No Jack Trevor Story. Moorcock is there. He’s included, quite generously summarised, and not just as a ‘science-fiction writer of the 1960s’. But how strange it must feel, to be allowed into the club, while ...”

“... of support that he was getting and went back to the US. Cook was more sympathetic and arranged for Keith Roberts, who knew the details of the Ward proposal, and Bryan Taylor, who had just joined the Aldermaston staff, to continue work on two-stage radiation implosion devices. They were assisted in the design work by the recruitment of several members of ...”

“... threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up for a second book ...”

“... the catalogue and editorial control showed signs of desperation. In the 1982 enlarged edition of Keith Roberts’s Degas – one of the books in the old Colour Plate Series which has been bumped up to the new Colour Library format – the flap refers to Edouard Degas, which makes you wonder whether there will be a book on Edgar Manet. Meanwhile the ...”

“... in which Minton was far from being the only considerable talent drinking itself to death. The ‘Roberts’ (Colquhoun and MacBryde) were there beside him; Dylan Thomas was boozing in the same pubs. Art is not made in that spirit any more. The notion that all things are a gamble, that candles should be burnt at both ends, that poverty is often art’s ...”

“... pass over this poem, though it gets a sensible if fleeting comment in the new book by Gifford and Roberts. But Hughes’s heroic imagination is not often exercised on ‘heroes’ of the warrior sort, ancient or modern. It is usually displaced, if that is the word, to animals or to inanimate ‘cosmic’ forces, thus neutralising the awkward impulse to moral ...”

“... salient features of the post-Thatcherite era of political economy. As Alfred Sherman liked to tell Keith Joseph in the Seventies, Keynes is dead. Thatcherism undoubtedly carried a doctrinal as well as a personal connotation, but it may be that it is best understood in a sense personal to Thatcher; that this helps to explain its ideological resilience in face ...”

“... NCCL was a barometric indication of the state of civil rights and the rule of law when Margaret Roberts was still a child. Yet it has taken the illiberal and unconstitutional conduct of her three governments to push a written constitution and a Bill of Rights to the head of the political agenda. The radical authoritarianism of the Eighties has finally ...”

“... they are among our most eloquent ‘inner émigrés’. Hence the enormous interest of Michèle Roberts’s contribution to the new Pandora anthology On Gender and Writing. In a volume remarkable for its intelligence and verve – one thinks of Angela Carter on writing fiction, Alison Hennegan on lesbian journalism, Fay Weldon interviewing herself – Ms ...”

“... years before, at the 1950 general election, a 24-year-old research chemist by the name of Margaret Roberts had stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. By now called Margaret Thatcher, she was elected MP for Finchley in 1959: the first chapter of Azriel Bermant’s outstandingly valuable Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East is titled ‘Thatcher and the ...”

“... to humanise it. His great find is a previously unseen cache of letters from the young Margaret Roberts to her older sister, Muriel, written variously from Grantham, Oxford and Dartford. There, she talks about boyfriends, fashion, shopping and the various inconveniences of life in wartime and then austerity Britain. They are, I suppose, human. But boy are ...”

“... working class. One or two things seem to have eluded Young. He mentions the young Margaret Roberts’s election campaign in Dartford in 1950, but neglects the best part of it. Ms Roberts insisted throughout the campaign that she would win. As they neared the last lap, her agent advised her to drop this line. She ...”

“... at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg and William Roberts – and a revolutionary moment in British art. Even to express support for Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibitions was daring and radical. Nevinson, having seen a contemporary art show in Venice, knew he was ‘bored with the old Masters’. He was ...”