“... stance in Sovietology was of a piece with his activity in the 1970s as a foreign policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Senator Henry Jackson in the United States on the ‘present danger’ of Soviet communism. Testifying before the US Congress, he stressed the peculiar (‘non-human’, in the terminology of his earlier sci-fi ...”

“... what I think and what I feel.’ (Vallejo says that Escobar thought of her much as he thought of Margaret Thatcher: too intellectual to be traditionally feminine but nonetheless compelling.) When they finally broke up, Vallejo attributed it to her discovery that Escobar had traded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewellery for a weekend with ...”

“... whereas I was plus 19. What would her face have looked like if I had dictated something about Dame Margaret Thatcher? Her face now clinches my point: we underreact to untruths about the past and over-react against untruths about the present. The Barneses could never have written their meticulous ‘Publishing History’ if they hadn’t been downright ...”

“... empire’ rhetoric in the 1980s came as a further nasty surprise for the Soviets. Margaret Thatcher had to explain to Reagan, having learned it from the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky, that the Soviets were spooked when the US stationed Pershing II missiles in the UK and Germany: they were genuinely afraid of attack. The upside of this ...”

“... in ideas. It is important to remember that today’s obsession with doctrine is new. Before Margaret Thatcher, British political culture looked down on theory, treating it as foreign and totalitarian. The Tories sneered at Labour for allegedly adhering to Continental doctrines, and Labour, embarrassed, sneered at its own intellectuals, calling them ...”

“... has not been entirely extinguished.’ The tone is very much that of Geoffrey Howe summing up on Margaret Thatcher. Smyth’s utterly convincing points ought to be put first. As part of his rejection of the ‘neurotic king’ thesis based entirely on Asser, he points out how underrated the Viking threat has increasingly become. It is now taken as ...”

“... sometimes tries to explain the subservience to Mao by drawing comparisons with the way in which Margaret Thatcher dominated her Cabinet, convinced as she was that she was right about everything. This, and the slightly flippant tone that often creeps in, is unsettling because it serves to minimise the fact that Mao’s power rested on a vast edifice of ...”

“... doing. But if he seriously believed that he would have such limited influence with George Bush as Margaret Thatcher had had with Ronald Reagan, he should have realised that he would, as the saying goes, have another think coming. Yet there he was at Number Ten for all those years. Politics is supposed to be a rough game, Blair is supposed to be a nice ...”

“... UK National Conservatism Conference, one fascinating sideshow was the brawl over the carcass of Margaret Thatcher. A few weeks before the event, Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, had warned those attending the conference against ‘importing the worst American narratives into British politics’ and in the process abandoning ...”

“... besieged by mass pickets. Right-wing Britain convinced itself that all this constituted, as Margaret Thatcher put it in her autobiography, an ‘outrageous abuse of trade union power’. But the strikers lost. One key reason was that the Labour government – supposedly the unions’ creature – refused to give pickets the legal right to detain ...”

“... the difficult long-term issues. The only other Conservative politician to leave a lasting mark was Margaret Thatcher, who had no qualms about mixing markets with medicine. Nor was there any attempt to disguise feelings of mutual loathing between doctors and government during the Thatcher years. It began straight ...”

“... voters of Brexit and Trump. These men were ideologically formed during the reign of Reagan and Thatcher, and their influence and prestige have grown in step with the expansion of Anglo-America’s intellectual and cultural capital. Lilla, a self-declared ‘centrist liberal’, arrived at his present position by way of working-class Detroit, evangelical ...”

“... last, this tolerated survivalism. Raworth returned. He came back to England. Just in time for Margaret Thatcher. The cultural historian Patrick Wright, a man with a secret fondness for poetry (holograph Louis Zukofsky on the wall), made the trip at the same time, decanted from Vancouver. Those hazy overseas slots were vanishing and England was going ...”

“... years. He often made light of his obsessions in interviews: Alanis Morissette. Melanie Griffith. Margaret Thatcher, leaning forward to cover his hand. These anecdotes must have gone over queasily even at the time; being obsessed with Margaret Thatcher in college is not within the typical range of human ...”

“... A few months alter the fall of Margaret Thatcher, the most original thinker of post-war Conservatism died. Perhaps partly because of the commotion caused by the change of national leadership, the passing of Michael Oakeshott did not attract much public notice. Even the Spectator, which might have been expected to mark the event with a full salute, ignored it for half a year, before carrying a curiously distracted piece by its editor, reporting strange losses in the philosopher’s papers, without so much as mentioning his political ideas ...”