“... have served Jones as his life’s motto’: his career was full of spectacular flops from which he rose unscathed. Though Maddox is too generous to interpret her motto in this way, Jones was also it seems a slippery character, ‘much hated’ by his colleagues, ‘spiteful, jealous and querulous … a fiery little man, with a staccato, military ...”

“... got the hang of Twitter, and now he feels that he was negligent in not doing so. He notes that Margaret Thatcher did all right without it – indeed, ‘the very idea that she could have contained her thoughts to 140 characters is preposterous. The Lady was not for tweeting. But I should have been.’ Really? Not only is the thought of Brown tweeting his ...”

“... of them as though they were still alive. As late as the autumn of 1992, when Middle England rose in revolt against the annihilation of the industry, the miner’s labour was identified so completely with the cause of manufacturing industry that a newly-elected Conservative government found itself in deep trouble with its own supporters when it tried to ...”

“... the worst:expect the best:andtake what comes‘Not a Hannah Arendt quote! :/’ Samantha Rose Hill, then the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College in New York State, tweeted back, across the hours and the Atlantic Ocean. ‘I know! ’Twas sweet gift,’ Stonebridge replied, then added: ‘We should make our own.’‘One ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the hands of the population of Canterbury, and his readiness to anticipate betrayal by the English rose he becomes attached to, a nurse called Catherine, are not signs of paranoia: for Daud is a black Muslim from Tanzania, and most of the white locals are either patronising or unforthcoming or directly hostile about ‘coons and wogs and smelly niggers’. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”