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“... that the Falklands War was a close-run thing, but gives a more or less positive assessment of Margaret Thatcher and Admiral Terence Lewin, as well as the British commanders in the field. (He doesn’t mention the fact that the Royal Navy deployed ships with nuclear weapons to the theatre against Foreign Office advice.) He praises the productive ...”

“... the Duchess of Windsor in a triple-pearl choker, Dorothy Sayers in a mannish coat and tie or Margaret Thatcher in high pie-crust frills, send messages about power rather than vulnerability. One of the most striking portraits in the book juxtaposes two images of female exposure and protection. Dame Laura Knight’s self-portrait of 1913 shows the ...”

“... and having written biographies of Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Rosalind Franklin, Nora Joyce and Margaret Thatcher, she knows how to give a logic to a life. Like many of Freud’s first disciples, Jones, she suggests, was drawn to psychoanalysis because it offered him the chance to correct, as he put it in a letter to his mentor, ‘various wrong ...”

“... particular whims and inclinations, and by stamping on rivals who may be getting above themselves. Margaret Thatcher was such a prime minister, but so too was Edward Heath, perhaps to an even greater extent (Heath’s cabinet was composed almost entirely of admirers and minions), which goes to show that dominance does not automatically translate into ...”

“... and the ‘family’, shimmying back and forth between the two as political expediency demanded. Margaret Thatcher made the conflation explicit in her notorious claim in 1987: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’ Cooper quotes Milton and Rose Friedman, who were ostensibly ...”

“... more ‘family-friendly’ experience. But the broader ideological terrain had already been set by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: socialism and the organised working class had been defeated, their political threat neutered. In 1994, the year of Loaded’s first issue and Oasis’s first album, Tony Blair took over the Labour Party and immediately ...”

“... which he gnawed loudly, often controversially. In 1989 he disparaged Hugo Young’s biography of Thatcher, in a piece of rhetorical brilliance about the profligacy of Thatcherism. In 1990 he sneered at Raymond Williams as a kindly old fellow from the valleys. In 1999, he savaged an authorised biography of Mandela, creating a stir on the letters page by ...”

“... Scotland 1945-79, challenges much of the received wisdom about an era – after the war, before Thatcher – that is gradually fading from collective memory. He does this by focusing on political culture itself, rather than the great tectonic plates of economics, technology and social structure which have usually undergirded the narrative. This aligns his ...”

“... his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery handshake of mutually beneficial relationships between local government corruption (‘The new casino’s gone through’), kickbacks to rogue Irish Republicans in the ...”

“... that any significant support existed for devolution. Weight seems to be rather spellbound by Margaret Thatcher, who was responsible for the next attempt to regenerate national pride. The early omens weren’t good. Weight picks up John O’Farrell’s story about her election as Conservative Party leader in 1976, when she appeared in front of the ...”

“... It’s not a government of the nation but a government of half the nation, a true legacy of Mrs Thatcher. Work is the only escape, which fortunately moves along a little.9 May. My birthday. A nice woman in a leopardskin coat who always speaks wishes me a happy birthday. I say that I wish it was. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ ‘Last Thursday. The ...”

“... In the dismal mid-Seventies Patrick Cosgrave, later to be Margaret Thatcher’s adviser and biographer, took me to a Friday luncheon at the old Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street. Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts ...”

“... Europe. May, Cameron, Major – weakened by defeat in the first Commons vote on Maastricht – and Thatcher, taken down by Geoffrey Howe in 1990 for undermining Britain’s negotiators in Brussels. By then her Euroscepticism had surged. But for ten years she had been keen to stay inside the tent, pissing in, if necessary. This is hard to remember now that a ...”

“... financiers diddling each other, what may be the last Elizabethan Tube came about because the Thatcher government decided to use public money to help a group of extremely rich people become even richer. Wolmar puts it this way: ‘The Jubilee Line extension is unique in being an underground line designed primarily to satisfy the needs of a private ...”

“... and belonged to a glittering group of gamblers, ravers, spendthrifts and eccentrics which included Margaret Thatcher, whose enterprise culture of the Eighties, with its poor view of poverty and failure, must have done something to temper Aspinall’s scorn at the degeneration of the species in the modern Britain of social welfare, and who should surely ...”