“... 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 ...”

“... embargo on arms shipments to Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Dr Alderman notes that when Margaret Thatcher was elected Conservative leader in 1975, she became the first leader of a major party to sit for a constituency where the Jewish vote is crucial. Dr Alderman’s book is really about prominent Jews and Jewish issues in British politics ...”

“... watershed was the Pinochet case. The fact that the former dictator, Cold War ally and friend of Margaret Thatcher, could be arrested on the instructions of a Spanish magistrate elicited guffaws of delighted disbelief from at least three generations of human rights activists. The principle of global jurisdiction covering outrageous human rights ...”

“... a pension of $200 a month. The Petrov episode was possibly in Gorbachev’s mind when he first met Margaret Thatcher at Chequers on 16 December 1984. Thatcher’s papers minute what he told her: ‘Mr Gorbachev argued that if both sides continued to pile up weapons this could lead to accidents or unforeseen ...”

“... potential of working-class politics was easily felt in a period bookended by Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher. In this hostile climate, Marxist historical scholarship experienced what Stedman Jones later called an ‘abrupt and terminal decline’. Reconstructing social totalities increasingly seemed a chimerical enterprise, and his earlier ...”

“... an image in Britain and America as vaguely hippyish lefty liberals, went one step further than Margaret Thatcher ever did. The Dutch establishment weaves a subtle web of complicity and patronage that binds its members together over generations, discouraging discussion of the past with outsiders. Ruud Lubbers, who as prime minister from 1982 to 1994 ...”

“... improved the fortunes of the labour movement? Would such an improvement have altered the course of Thatcher’s government? Paul Routledge answers some of these questions and finesses others. A long-serving labour correspondent, Routledge did much of his work at the Times. With Mick Costello of the Morning Star, he was the leader of the leftist tendency within ...”

“... his period in Northern Ireland (he remained the Ulster Unionist MP for South Down until 1987), Margaret Thatcher took care to stay on friendly terms with Powell, partly out of a certain sympathy with his views and partly because his support, even when it was tacit, could do her no harm, but she never made any move to tempt him back into the Tory ...”

“... a pagan pantheon apart from God – the queen, Churchill, James Bond, Bobby Moore, Sid Vicious, Margaret Thatcher; the miner, the Spitfire pilot, the NHS nurse – and sacred spaces, some famous, such as Wembley or Waterloo or Dunkirk, some idealised: the factory, the village, the rural airfield in 1941. Each summer, millions of people go to arts and ...”

“... the US president, George Bush Senior, was reported by the Washington Post as having spoken to Margaret Thatcher about Lockerbie, advising her to keep Lockerbie ‘low-key’, to avoid prejudicing negotiations with Syrian and Iranian-backed groups holding Western hostages in Lebanon. There were no arrests; Channon left the cabinet; and political ...”

“... for himself. That lurch into apocalyptic comic strip, peopled by grotesques, began around the Thatcher period; that was the beginning of my last London. Of course, there have been many last Londons. London stalls, revives, suffers and renews itself all the time; but now I anticipate an endgame for the kind of writing with which I have been associated. I ...”