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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and subordinates like Crossman, for political acuity. In 1992, the year of European integration, Margaret Thatcher will have been prime minister for 13 years, and will, not coincidentally, have made Crossman’s observations about prime ministerial fiat seem tentative. In these facts, and in the relation between them, the emptiness of an unprincipled ...”

“... that it can never be usurped. Sir Keith Joseph is now known as Lord Joseph of Portsoken. If Margaret Thatcher really does go green and hold on for another ten years, Kenneth Baker may yet receive due recognition as Lord Baker of ...”

“... Wilfred Newton, the accountant who had finished off the Hong Kong MTR and then been asked back by Margaret Thatcher to sort out London Transport. Newton promptly called for his little band of Hong Kong experts. And so Paoletti, after some hard bargaining, came back to England. In the final stage of the MTR he had tried without success to sneak a little ...”