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“... waters of the Minch, swam out to the boat and returned to the beach with a rope. Elizabeth and Margaret stood waiting in their floral prints. Nigel tied them on, one by one, and they swam out towards the herring drifter, speechless with cold, while their skirts spread like peonies around them.’ When Nicolson sets out to uncover Shiant history, he is able ...”

“... Turning back a volume or two we come to the dinner party in January 1930 with the Harrises. Bogey Harris was apparently quite a character. In her account, unerring as it clearly is, he ceases to be one, as do his womenfolk and the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, ‘an unimpressive man; eyes disappointing; rather ...”

“... his spouse to a dazed friend with ‘That’s My First Wife Up There, and This Is the Present Mrs Harris.’ The first Mrs Harris seems to be crouched on all fours on the top of a very high (glazed) bookcase, just behind the second Mrs Harris. This image has found an appreciative audience ...”

“... riches, for the companies and shareholders who monopolise our water supply today. In England, Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished state-owned regional water authorities in 1989, and water was privatised. Eleven of England’s 18 water utilities are at least partly owned by foreign entities, including the giant conglomerate Macquarie (Thames ...”

“... that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a resounding 67 per cent majority in favour of continued EEC membership. Whitelaw confessed in his memoirs that he had rather enjoyed ...”

“... agreed to Chevaline without telling most of the Cabinet, let alone the Labour Party, and when Margaret Thatcher with the solitary aid of Cecil Parkinson conducted the major decisions of the Falklands War. It so happens that Arthur Tedder was a distant kinsman of my father, who married, after his first wife died, my father’s cousin, ‘Toppy’ Seton ...”

“... Some time​ in 1979, after the death of Sid Vicious and before the enthronement of Margaret Thatcher, Vivienne Westwood ‘lost interest’ in punk. She and her lover Malcolm McLaren had been at the heart of the British version: they had dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound ...”

“... Bousted said. ‘And money we don’t have, apparently. So it becomes a vanity project.’ The new Harris Westminster Sixth Form was criticised by Margaret Hodge, chair of the Public Accounts Committee, after it emerged that the free school, with a set-up budget of £45 million, or £90,000 per pupil, would be the most ...”

“... designers were brought in to do the costumes. These were Elizabeth Montgomery and her two partners Margaret and Sophia Harris, the Motleys, who specialised in producing stunning effects with the cheapest materials. The OUDS Romeo and Juliet entranced all who saw it and was the trial run for the triumphant version Gielgud ...”

“... the key decision in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ad-men and advisers, was to run a campaign fuelled by fear, a re-run of ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it.’ Fear was a tune which the Prime Minister had practised assiduously over the ...”

“... the soot like rivulets through a desert’ – but most of the prose sounds like this: I told Margaret and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten that I considered this a far-reaching decision. I laid out a process for making it. I would clarify my guiding principles, listen to experts on all sides of the debate, reach a tentative conclusion, and run it past ...”

“... able to count on the loyalty of his most likely successor, Willie Whitelaw. While Whitelaw waited, Margaret Thatcher struck, and had built up considerable momentum by the time Whitelaw could bring himself to act. However, the successful assassin was herself to be toppled in the autumn of 1990 in a moment of group frenzy so bizarre that even Tory commentators ...”

“... his period in Northern Ireland (he remained the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down until 1987), Margaret Thatcher took care to stay on friendly terms with Powell, partly out of a certain sympathy with his views and partly because his support, even when it was tacit, could do her no harm, but she never made any move to tempt him back into the Tory fold, for ...”

“... by the pathos and surprising detail of lives rarely chronicled elsewhere. There is poor René Harris, a Catholic organ-maker in Augustan London eager to improve himself. We learn that someone this marginal nonetheless wanted and was able to commission a portrait of his wife. But it was while he was away mending organs to pay for such status-objects that ...”

“... interesting people, despite being rather dull myself’. She was born, as Jean Campbell-Harris, in 1922 to aristocratic parents who sent her to a series of schools where she was ‘dreadfully homesick’ and ‘almost suicidally miserable’. But she insists that ‘it wasn’t my parents’ fault. They were born in the 19th century and brought up ...”