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“... breakthrough in 1979, a year of strikes, bombs, serial killers, high inflation and the election of Margaret Thatcher. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan felt like the beginning of the end of the world. As Savage says, ‘there was a sense – reinforced by the vacant, derelict inner cities – that the bomb had already dropped.’ We were nostalgic for ...”

“... they can hear his voice on the radio in the hotel bar below. He is present in this novel much as Margaret Thatcher is in The Ploughman’s Lunch – to root the story in the real. McEwan uses current affairs much as a rock band uses drums or a salesman uses a smile. The fact that Macmillan is still in power also helps us to be convinced by Florence’s ...”

“... disempowering county and city government, long the power base of the Tories’ electoral strength, Margaret Thatcher did likewise. She told her own party activists that they were not wanted and knocked from under her the support of local power and patronage that was the essence of a mass party. Thus, under leaders of both parties since 1979, the poor ...”

“... best. Born in 1928, Smithson is among the youngest of the women she considers. A contemporary of Margaret Thatcher, Smithson, like Thatcher, made her way in a masculine environment by behaving like a man, only more so. Cooke is careful to avoid special pleading. Her tactful descriptions of Smithson as a woman who ...”

“... decision-makers. The refocusing of attention takes us a long way from the actionist narrative of Margaret Thatcher, whose memoir The Downing Street Years (1993) documents countless acts of individual will (‘I was chiefly concerned,’ ‘I did not share the common view,’ ‘I was right’) and whose central protagonist frequently ridicules or ...”

“... is raised that the sturdily ineloquent mill-owner Mr Thornton can rise to the rhetorical level of Margaret Hale: I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit . . . We hate to have laws made for us at a distance. We wish people would allow us ...”

“... figure was Antony Armstrong-Jones, the commoner (and photographer) whose engagement to Princess Margaret caused a stir in 1960, and who liked to wear jeans rather than his old Etonian tie. That year, Armstrong-Jones singlehandedly transformed the dress code of stylish London restaurants when he arrived at the Trattoria Terrazza in a rollneck – and was ...”

“... like Peter Walker, barely note its existence in their memoirs; and in The Downing Street Years Margaret Thatcher has nothing to say on the matter beyond a reference to the privatisation of ‘Britoil (a nationalised North Sea exploration and production company set up by Labour in 1975)’. This is odd not only because the Britoil privatisation was the ...”

“... consensus will not have brought mankind to its senses? Meanwhile perhaps we should be grateful to Margaret Thatcher for having won a majority large enough to give her opponents plenty of time for second thoughts. No doubt a few individuals will break away from the party as they have done in the past, either to plough a lonely furrow of independence, like ...”

“... main nightly news bulletins – priceless moments of political prime time which show Kinnock up or Thatcher down or Owen playing prime minister for a day. And built around those images come ideas and patterns to be repeated through the political year, whether true or false – a seasonal yield of misty perceptions which are all we know of political ...”

“... whose life touched many bases. A Second World War veteran who became a close friend and ally of Margaret Thatcher, he was killed by Irish republicans when a bomb attached to his car exploded as he left the underground car park at the Palace of Westminster. Speaking to the Media Society in 1977, Neave had pitched his idea for a ‘Belfast Starsky and ...”

“... When​ Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, Times Higher Education asked the former Cambridge vice-chancellor Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, who ran the government’s University Grants Committee in the 1980s, about her approach. ‘The instinct of a woman is to spring-clean,’ he said, ‘and this country needed spring-cleaning, not least the university sector ...”

“... know. They prefer to avert their gaze, reminding the reader of the sketch in Spitting Image when Margaret Thatcher dines with members of her cabinet: Waitress: ‘Would you like to order, Sir?’ Thatcher: ‘Yes, I will have a steak.’ Waitress: ‘How’d you like it?’ ...”

“... a professor of paediatric medicine at Bristol University, contrived to drop a cup of coffee at Margaret Thatcher’s feet. He stooped down to mop it up, then sprang up and asked her for money. ‘I’m Professor Butler,’ he’s reported to have said. ‘We’re doing a national study looking at thousands of children. We need more funding!’ She ...”

“... superhuman job’.Women were banned from working underground by the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act. Margaret Hedley’s account of her great-grandmother’s married life in the first decades of the 20th century illuminates the conditions faced by women in pit villages. Susan Jopling gave birth to five daughters in a tied cottage in Ludworth in County ...”