“... 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 ...”

“... of power. It may have been spared a report from the Peacock Committee which fully satisfied Mrs Thatcher’s desire to subject the Corporation to advertising, but the report appears to have been succeeded by plans for the commercialising of Radios 1 and 2. With the death of the Chairman of its Board of Governors, Stuart Young, we have been braced for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of it in the interwar period (as we can indeed in the 1880s or the 1760s), it was forged more by Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch than it was by Lloyd George and Sir John Reith. In this world – our world – ‘class’ has become a dirty word, one not even Labour politicians can speak without being labelled sectarians or romantics. So let me be ...”

“... figures. (Imagine being puzzled that there were very different assessments of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher or the presidency of Ronald Reagan.) They have also been more confident than most that some kind of accurate calibration of monstrosity v. political virtue is attainable. Hence there has been a long series of worthy studies reaching the ...”

“... land of UK independence. In 1975 the future standard-bearer of Bruges speech Euroscepticism, Margaret Thatcher, had been the photogenic new leader of a largely Europhile Conservative Party, and the proud owner of a hideous woolly jumper displaying the flags of the EEC nations. Back in the mid-1970s the tycoon James Goldsmith, the future founder of ...”

“... for the old and the infirm, that is called into question. By the time of Sheep’s Clothing, with Margaret Thatcher in power, not much has changed except that scamming is harder work in a world less easily beguiled (‘There’s nothing I need that I can’t get for myself,’ one intended dupe retorts). The title refers to the pretence of ‘cradle to ...”

“... may beg to differ. The early recordings are painfully stagey. The first, from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant ...”

“... cut-the-welfare-bills ‘Labour’ Government whose leader is said to be a serious admirer of Margaret Thatcher? (‘Third Way’? It’s just the sensible, well-tried electoral trick of stealing your opponent’s clothes.) Stephen has recently seen John Redwood, who has so far recovered from post-electoral stress disorder as to be predicting that ...”

“... There are​ people who like the idea of living in a hotel, but nobody wants to die in one. Margaret Thatcher checked in to the Ritz in December 2012, a couple of weeks after she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. ‘She loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore ...”

“... Denis Thatcher is entirely inventable – as John Wells understood: he comes in a flat pack with easy-to-follow instructions, all the components familiar general shapes, all parts from stock, no odd angles, no imagination required. When they came up with the idea for Ikea, they used Denis Thatcher as the prototype ...”

“... leaders in this period emerge as who they were rather than as what they did. The main exception is Margaret Thatcher, who gets a page about her character and background – much more than De Gaulle, Willy Brandt or Khrushchev. This is curious for several reasons. First of all, because Judt does not like Thatcher, giving ...”

“... was publicly exposed in 1979, during which year the Queen revoked his knighthood and he voted for Margaret Thatcher. Blunt is the enigmatist’s enigma. The English imagination has responded strongly to this compounding of spycraft, scholarship, homosexual intrigue and royal scandal. Blunt’s 1979 exposure and his death in 1983 occasioned books, plays ...”

“... had ‘next to no impact’. Grammar, as well as decency, caused arguments. Lord Hailsham wrote to Margaret Thatcher: ‘I am convinced there must be some limit to vulgarity! Could they not use the literate “sexual intercourse”? If that is thought to be too narrow, then why not “sexual relations” or “physical practices”, but not ...”

“... be defended, and returned to their homes, frustrated but resigned. Some Western leaders, not least Margaret Thatcher, were hoping in vain for such a demonstration of Soviet firmness. So why did Gorbachev and his colleagues choose to stay on the sidelines? Why did they not even play the ‘German card’, as some of their close advisers urged, to woo West ...”