“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”