Bullets in the Mail

Krithika Varagur: After Khashoggi, 3 June 2021

The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia 
by Madawi Al-Rasheed.
Hurst, 394 pp., £20, December 2020, 978 1 78738 379 1
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... couple of years ago. His favourite food as a teenager (McDonald’s), his role models (Bill Gates, Margaret Thatcher), his jargon (Key Performance Indicators), the entertainers he picked for private parties (Pitbull and PSY), his choice of intimidation techniques (an envelope with a bullet in it), the video games he liked (Age of Empires and Call of ...

Adventures at the End of Time

Angela Carter, 7 March 1991

Downriver 
by Iain Sinclair.
Paladin, 407 pp., £14.99, March 1991, 0 586 09074 6
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... And the Widow is still in charge. Who could have guessed, when Downriver went to press, that Margaret Thatcher would have resigned by publication date? Not Sinclair. When he appears in the third person in the final story, he babbles ‘some bravado sub-text about considering his book a failure if the Widow clung on to power one year after its ...

Only Sleeping

Anne Barton: Variations on Elizabeth I, 10 July 2003

England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy 
by Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson.
Oxford, 348 pp., £19.99, November 2002, 0 19 818377 1
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... condition of her sex. As for parallels recently drawn between Elizabeth’s character and that of Margaret Thatcher, they have rarely been flattering to either. Dobson and Watson tell this story adroitly, interweaving it with that different but concurrent phenomenon: Elizabeth fictionalised as a love-lorn and unhappy woman compelled to sacrifice her ...

Even Uglier

Terry Eagleton: Music Hall, 20 December 2012

My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall 
by John Major.
Harper, 363 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 00 745013 8
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... salon and theatre’. Not many former Tory leaders can produce chunks of sociology like that. Margaret Thatcher might have found it politically unsound. There are ideological reasons why Major’s music-hall background is less improbable than it seems. It was, after all, a deeply conservative institution. As he puts it, it was ...

Spiritual Rock Star

Terry Eagleton: The failings of Pope John Paul II, 3 February 2005

The Pope in Winter: The Dark Face of John Paul II’s Papacy 
by John Cornwell.
Viking, 329 pp., £20, February 2005, 0 670 91572 6
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... have given way to a brutal right-wing backlash. As John Paul came into power, so too did Margaret Thatcher, who when asked what the New Testament meant to her, replied ‘freedom of choice’. There are many acolytes of John Paul who would reply ‘chastity, abstinence and ...

The Bad News about the Resistance

Neal Ascherson: Parachuted into France, 30 July 2020

A Schoolmaster’s War: Harry Rée, British Agent in the French Resistance 
edited by Jonathan Rée.
Yale, 204 pp., £14.99, March 2020, 978 0 300 24566 0
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... Arabs and Vietnamese, and also about their wives, and women in general, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher.’ He found this ‘phoney, oppressive and grotesque – “like Buñuel”, as he put it once we had made our excuses and left’. And yet, it’s hard not to feel that his hosts were demonstrating exactly the point he kept trying to ...

In Pam’s Club

Azadeh Moaveni: Anglo-American Liaisons, 23 April 2026

Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power 
by Sonia Purnell.
Virago, 512 pp., £10.99, September 2025, 978 0 349 01475 3
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... occasion described by Bedell Smith is revealing. In 1996 Pamela found herself sharing a stage with Margaret Thatcher, who was serving as the chancellor of William and Mary College, which had received generous donations from Pamela and Averell over the years and was now awarding her an honorary degree. It was ...

Down with deflation!

Paul Seabright, 12 December 1996

... Prizewinner in economics but by an Oxford chemistry graduate with a second-class degree called Margaret Thatcher. Until the 1983 election it was virtually the unanimous wisdom of economists that no UK government could be re-elected with unemployment standing at over a million. Mrs Thatcher showed them what they ...

Thinking the unthinkable

John Naughton, 4 September 1980

... and our liberty.1 The decisions about nuclear weapons which are currently on the agenda of the Thatcher Government have awesome implications for British society. Yet large sections of the intellectual establishment treat them with what Daniel Moynihan once described as ‘benign neglect’. In this respect, Britain is radically different from some of her ...

Dirty Money

Paul Foot, 17 December 1992

A Full Service Bank: How BCCI stole millions around the world 
by James Ring Adams and Douglas Frantz.
Simon and Schuster, 381 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 671 71133 4
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Bankrupt: The BCCI Fraud 
by Nick Kochan and Bob Whittington.
Gollancz, 234 pp., £4.99, November 1991, 0 575 05279 1
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The BCCI Affair: A Report to The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 
by Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown.
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 800 pp., September 1992
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Inquiry into the Supervision of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International 
by Lord Justice Bingham.
HMSO, 218 pp., £19.30, October 1992, 0 10 219893 4
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... British readers will be tut-tutting by now, remarking perhaps what nasty things can go on in what Margaret Thatcher’s well-bred Minister of State, Alan Clark, tastefully described as Bongo Bongo Land. They should read this, from Kochan and Whittington’s little book: ‘BCCI made hay out of the London connection. Arabs from the newly-enriched Gulf ...

How does one talk to these people?

Andrew O’Hagan: David Storey in the Dark, 1 July 2021

A Stinging Delight: A Memoir 
by David Storey.
Faber, 407 pp., £20, June, 978 0 571 36031 4
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... leisure – the two poles of English working-class life that would begin to switch position under Margaret Thatcher. Rugby league was an escape but also a way for a burly kid to earn money. The novel’s main character, Arthur Machin, is a classic British New Wave conundrum: fleet of foot but heavy of heart, sensitive but brutalised, free in himself but ...

Do put down that revolver

Rosemary Hill, 14 July 2016

The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House between the Wars 
by Adrian Tinniswood.
Cape, 406 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 0 224 09945 5
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... flowering at Rodmarton Manor in Gloucestershire. Designed by Ernest Barnsley for Claud and Margaret Biddulph, Rodmarton was finished in 1929, having been built over thirty years on William Morris principles of handwork. The materials were local as were the builders and furnishers, who produced joinery for the timber framing, needlework and ...
Carrington: A Life and a Policy 
by Patrick Cosgrave.
Dent, 182 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 460 04691 8
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ThatcherThe First Term 
by Patrick Cosgrave.
Bodley Head, 240 pp., £9.95, June 1985, 0 370 30602 3
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Viva Britannia: Mrs Thatcher’s Britain 
by Paolo Filo della Torre.
Sidgwick, 101 pp., £9.95, October 1985, 0 283 99143 7
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... who has been within and without the Conservative Party for many years. He has played Boswell to Margaret Thatcher’s Johnson, having come in from the cold, as it were, of the Heath years. He has now written a book about Peter Carrington, who resigned, of course, as Foreign Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982. The book may ...
... but few would agree with the strategy of immediately sending troops because George Bush and Margaret Thatcher assumed that wogs could be told to behave by the white man: there is a pattern of such contemptuous attitudes towards the Arab world, from the days of the British expeditionary force sent to Egypt in 1882 to put down the Orabi rebellion to ...

Among the Sandemanians

John Hedley Brooke, 25 July 1991

Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist 
by Geoffrey Cantor.
Macmillan, 359 pp., £40, May 1991, 0 333 55077 3
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... have been constructed, each with its own seductive charm. There is the Faraday publicly admired by Margaret Thatcher (and her successor no doubt), the Faraday who without the privilege of a university education but with bags of initiative rose from book-binder’s apprentice at the age of 14 to such eminence in science that he was offered (though he ...