“... noticed the hitherto undirected members of the chorus uneasily wandering about the stage. He rose from his seat, rushed down to the front of the stalls to call a halt while he told them what to do. But operas are not so easily stopped as plays and the orchestra ploughed on relentlessly, with Gielgud trying to make himself heard. Suddenly his voice ...”

“... and the ‘family’, shimmying back and forth between the two as political expediency demanded. Margaret Thatcher made the conflation explicit in her notorious claim in 1987: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’ Cooper quotes Milton and Rose Friedman, who were ...”

“... One reason was that nobody was prepared to give Mrs Thatcher bad news. Poor Cecil knew that ‘Margaret, with her deep commitment to nuclear power, would never wear it.’ At the last minute, reality broke through: the nuclear power stations were withdrawn from the sale and transferred to Nuclear Electric, which remained, for the time being, in public ...”

“... in the script. The country rejects the worn-out panaceas of the Labour administration and elects Margaret Thatcher, and she, with what Cameron calls ‘huge courage and perseverance’, sets Britain on a dynamic new course towards its now tremulous destiny as financial capitalism’s leading counting house. Thatcher is the phoenix; the 1970s, the ...”

“... Secretaries also did well. Between 1950 and 1962 an unskilled female office worker’s pay rose 180 per cent. By 1962, most girls leaving East End schools, and around one in five boys, went into office work. They travelled into the centre of town every day and spent their wages in the record shops, the new coffee bars and, of course, the ...”

“... most consistent of all Byron’s doxies’. He quotes Byron’s own reminiscence of his cousin, Margaret Parker, ‘one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings’, only to round off the paragraph by observing that Margaret Parker ‘took evanescence to the limit by dying’. Biographer and subject could hardly be ...”

“... on average better-fed, longer-lived, healthier and better-housed than ever before. Life expectancy rose significantly across the period (from 52 to 61 for men from 1910 to 1938 and from 55 to 66 for women), and infant mortality fell. Aggressive house-building by governments and private builders alike, coupled with the introduction of long-term mortgages, made ...”

“... detailed Bellow-surrogate). Home is Chicago. The year is uncertain: there are mentions of Carter, Margaret Thatcher, but also of Entebbe, Cambodia. The Dean has come to Bucharest with his Rumanian wife Minna, a distinguished astronomer. Minna’s mother Valeria is dying. ‘Corde had come to give support.’ He is consciously testing his reserves as a good ...”

“... and made a stab at dragging its image into the second half of the 20th century (hence the red rose in place of the red flag). He worked behind the scenes to deliver a stunning rebuff to that section of Norman Tebbit’s 1984 Trade Union Act which required unions to hold a secret ballot of their members on whether they should continue to raise a political ...”

“... hidden in all political parties.’ Hosking – who started out as a Cornish scholarship girl and rose to become a senior civil servant under Harold Wilson and Edward Heath and, later, a top executive at breakfast television – has written a memoir of her rise to the top of the British establishment. Sentence by sentence, her story is likeable and impressive ...”

“... rush down the slope of trans-Atlantic replication ... I actually saw her embracing her friend Margaret in a manner that I can only describe as fulsome. I was observing through a chink in the french window draperies. They appeared to be scantily clad. It was not a sight calculated to refresh the spirit. I had difficulty restraining myself from rapping on ...”

“... sustain a strategy in peacetime. Like it or not – it is not one of Jenkins’s own analogies – Margaret Thatcher, in seizing her moment in the Eighties, temporarily came nearest to matching Gladstone’s more persistent impact on the politics of his day, in effectively mobilising popular support behind a recasting of the common sense of government. One ...”

“... irritated as Arthur Andersen’s lawyers got hold of Cabinet minutes and even a statement from Margaret Thatcher. Relations between the firm and the Government became ever more strained in spite of the fact that a former Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath, was on Arthur Andersen and Co’s payroll. The legal action and the strain led to a decree banning ...”

“... sharing the news that ‘nothing else’ Umberto Eco wrote was ‘as successful as The Name of the Rose’? The whole novel is full of statements that seem like a pastiche of the very idea of saying something, and at one point the narrator comments on the cliché ‘if you care to know my opinion’: ‘This is what a lot of people say when their opinion is ...”

“... name redacted, which seemed to reinforce their invulnerability, though one might sympathise with Rose McGowan’s remark that she hadn’t publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of raping her because ‘I didn’t want his name next to mine in my obituary.’ Harman says she has never been propositioned or groped by another MP. Female MPs are probably less likely ...”