“... ten. The writer’s world grows proportionately more crowded: not only George Sand, but Lamartine, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Mazzini and many others put in personal appearances; and to the usual flow of topics – the gossip, the solicitous inquiries about illness and, above all, the literary exchange – are added exhilarated accounts of the pleasures of motion ...”

“... an invitation to read, she wrote that her would-be hostess had ‘mistaken me for little Tich or Margaret Cooper at the piano’.The question of how she was to be received seems to have been linked, in Mew’s mind, with how she was to be remembered. In an early lyric she imagined friends standing round her deathbed and speaking of her ‘indulgently, as of ...”

“... of land from state to private ownership is the biggest of the privatisations that began under Margaret Thatcher and have continued under every administration since, dwarfing in both scope and value the more prominent sales of utilities such as gas, electricity and water, or social housing under the Right to Buy scheme, or nationalised industries such as ...”

“... he had better send someone over to England. This he did later on, and she was able to show them a Margaret McMillan Day Nursery.’ She had less success in persuading Stalin to mend his ways. Asked by her how long he intended to continue dealing with political opponents by exiling them to Siberia, Stalin replied that he would do so ‘only so long as may be ...”

“... had come to see us off. Garibaldi and his men were cheered by a big crowd. The American journalist Margaret Fuller was there. ‘Never have I seen a sight so beautiful,’ she reported, ‘so romantic and sad … I saw the wounded … laden upon their baggage carts … I saw many youths, born to rich inheritance, carrying in a handkerchief all their worldly ...”

“... chair sits the judge – a tall, blue-bodied frog, spindly, with the head of a fledgling bird. A rose-coloured sash wraps round his lap, then drapes onto the floor in front of him. On his head, a cauldron as a hat.’Recognisable daily reality doesn’t disappear for good. The authoritative factual tone used to describe the housing estate is produced on ...”

“... When​ King Fahd of Saudi Arabia discovered in late November 1990 that his friend Margaret Thatcher had been turfed out of Downing Street after 11 years he thought she must have been the victim of a coup d’état. How else to explain it? She was undefeated in general elections and, more puzzling still, she was about to send her armed forces into battle ...”

“... the conventional case for the middle way at the Conservative Research Department in the Seventies, Margaret Thatcher pulled out a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. ‘This,’ she proclaimed, ‘is what we believe.’ (The now elderly economist was in turn much affected by his disciple. Asked for his impressions on meeting her, he was, as ...”

“... I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not invented, were surely concealed like the author himself under ...”

“... to return favours … which could make her seem cold and ungrateful’. Carruth’s wife, Rose Marie, remembered the meadow where Conrad killed himself as the site of an infamous picnic, where an increasingly abrasive Rich announced that ‘she planned to give away her pots and pans’ and ‘do a lot less cooking’.After Conrad’s death, Rich ...”

“... the saints, to the cautionary lives of the rich and addicted. The anthropology of Malinowski and Margaret Mead was another crucial inspiration, for their vision of alternative social arrangements (and sexual freedom) provided passionate support for culture over nature, for social conditioning over biological destiny. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which had ...”

“... that she was herself French, but we know of two earlier maids in the Mountjoy household – Margaret Brown and Joan Langford – and both were English. Could Mountjoy’s servant and concubine in 1613 be Frances Williams? This is speculation, of course, though it would explain why Mountjoy ends up being charged along with the three Frenchmen. As the ...”

“... 1974. In February the SNP won seven seats with 22 per cent of the national vote. In October, that rose to eleven seats with 30 per cent. While the party surged into second place in Labour seats across the country, most of its new MPs represented the old unionist heartlands that Petrie emphasises: places like Banffshire, Argyll, and Moray and Nairn, where ...”

“... to the studio bosses. When Garland became pregnant by her first husband, a musician called David Rose, the studio encouraged her to have an abortion: a baby would have ruined her image as a girlish ingénue.Garland felt the oppression of being an eternal teenager so keenly that she didn’t immediately welcome Meet Me in St Louis when discussions about it ...”

“... years is reaching the point of crisis. The party in power, whose late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space. In effect, if not in explicit intention, it is a ...”