“... 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 ...”

“... its vote has fallen in all but one instance – 1966. In 1979 the affluent workers helped Mrs Thatcher to power. In 1983 they did so again in still greater numbers. Tenure is overtaking occupation, and class, as the chief determinant of voting behaviour. Some 60 per cent of homes are today owner-occupied, the vast majority of them on mortgage. Some twelve ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In February 1981 Mrs Thatcher made an ecstatic pilgrimage to Washington to commune with the new President, Ronald Reagan, about such then modish topics as supply-side economics and the evil empire. Hugo Young recalls the ‘patronising astonishment’ with which her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, witnessed this effusive display ...”

“... yesterday’s paper provide a similar check? Obviously not: yet on what principle shall we include Margaret Thatcher and Bessie Smith (both in Collins) and exclude some John Smith who had to be rescued after a fall in Snowdonia? The answer is, of course, common sense – and on the whole there seems to have been a good supply in Aylesbury (largely, one ...”

“... of Semtex H, a very high quality explosive, possibly from Colonel Gaddafi in retaliation for Mrs Thatcher’s aid for the US air strike on Tripoli. This explosive has no smell, is as malleable as putty, and is virtually undetectable by dogs, X-rays or the usual electronic gas detection methods. It is the perfect material for VIP ambushes. The IRA have made ...”

“... construction of the Pergau Dam in Malaysia in return for an arms contract worth a billion pounds. Margaret Thatcher herself had endorsed the scheme. The resulting furore prompted the Labour opposition to commit to managing the aid budget through a new, separate department, independent of competing government interests and focused on the poorest people in ...”

“... political agenda in 1988 is quite different from that which faced Peel. The Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher, embarked with confidence on its third term, is very different from the uncertain and demoralised party which Peel took over after the Reform Bill. If he had been with us over the last decade, he would have been pleased, but not perhaps ...”

“... picture of the praises of Elizabeth, which are much like those in the Conservative picture of Margaret Thatcher; and by doubting the allegiance of Elizabethans to the Great Chain of Being and indicating the empathy with which Sidney and Shakespeare (if not Spenser, obsessed as he was with the Irish) broached the topic of rebellion. Inside the ...”

“... one of those echt German dishes like the Saumagen Helmut Kohl once had served up to a bemused Margaret Thatcher. As with so many of his early poems (it comes from his second book Gleisdreieck, 1960, the title taken from the Berlin S-Bahn station), its pseudo-logical structure recalls the poet’s debt to Dada; in his recipe, the simple substitution ...”

“... and he found favour in many quarters – in apartheid South Africa, for instance, and with Margaret Thatcher, who once spoke of his ‘wise leadership’ – but his influence seemed bleached out by many things, not least the glare of American television, which continued to play in my mind as we reached the dusty roads. Mega-Bite Take Away, said a ...”

“... His birth in Czechoslovakia and escape to England, the three marriages, the admiration of Margaret Thatcher, the support for political detainees in Eastern European and for writers in prison. His plays have been tirelessly sifted for biographical inflections: The Real Thing to prove that the intellectual gymnast had a heart; Rock ’n’ Roll to ...”

“... conundrum. Why didn’t Williams achieve more politically? Why did the polarising, hectoring Margaret Thatcher, rather than the consensus-seeking, appealing Williams, become Britain’s first woman prime minister? This is a common question. Among left-leaning right-thinking Britons of a certain age, Williams is the embodiment of lost hopes and lost ...”