“... It was the end of a Cabinet meeting and Mrs Thatcher was cross. It was all so silly, so unnecessary. She was half-way through her second term as prime minister – a bad time for most governments, but hers was doing surprisingly well. Earlier in the year, the most dangerous of all the ‘enemies within’, the miners’ union, had been thoroughly beaten in a tough fight ...”

“... past ten years, it has acquired a further meaning. It can now mean someone who is opposed to Mrs Thatcher’s politics, and has been exposed to redundancy by her success. She is seen to have made them failures, or to have driven them off to higher salaries in America, and to have encouraged them to be snobs. Intellectuals are people who call her common or ...”

“... yields us a camped-up whodunnit. Flamboyant crimes and scandalous secrets marked the Thatcher epoch, just as they do the life of the novel’s voyeuristic, emotionally autistic narrator, Michael Owen, whose finger hovers constantly by the freeze-frame button as he drools over videos. The Thatcherite Eighties were all about emotionally retarded ...”

“... tomboy who wanted to hang on to the privileges that boys and men had. In a way, she reminded me of Margaret Thatcher, who was hailed by many feminists as a blow struck for feminism and turned out to be nothing of the sort. Doris used her femininity where it was useful or enjoyable, but had no interest at all in the actual politics of feminism, or in ...”

“... faced in forcing European and American leaders to impose sanctions when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sympathised with the Pretoria regime. Walter’s attribution of the fall of apartheid to pity, white-collar public outrage, elite wisdom, capitalist pragmatism and demographic determinism is odd in a book about civil war. Her text ...”

“... when international affairs are the arena of vanity par excellence. Another victim of it was Margaret Thatcher, ditched for neglecting her party while she affixed her signature to the Paris Charter. Her condolences to Gorbachev were more than fitting. It is no accident that the two most successful political machines of the postwar world, which in 45 ...”

“... hikes and a one-off ‘solidarity tax’ on property. Like the poll tax that did so much to bring Margaret Thatcher down, like the head tax the Ottoman Empire charged Christian Greeks, it takes little account of people’s ability to pay. It comes in two whopping instalments of hundreds of euros each. And it comes as part of the electricity bill. If ...”

“... appointing women to important positions than any of his predecessors, including his ultimate hero, Margaret Thatcher. He boasts that by the time he left office nearly half his special advisers were female. He resents the accusation that he was running a ‘chumocracy’, which is one reason Gove’s jibe about the Old Etonian coterie at Number 10 really ...”

“... more interesting phenomenon, but is the wording of her dedications interesting or original? ‘To Margaret Rutherford, in admiration’: I share the admiration for Margaret Rutherford, but not the admiration for this as a dedication. There can be no intrinsic objection to such a dedication as Thomas Moore’s, of Lalla ...”

“... Hood is a tax-cutter and a handout-denouncer. He’s Jeremy Clarkson. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1000. He’s in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering a workshy ...”

“... civil engineering achievements. Look at anything deriving from the key icon of the era, Margaret Thatcher, hard hat perched on hard hair, giving her blessing to Paul Reichmann, as they gloat over a scale-model of the future city of glass. My spirits were high. The Dome (or ‘Doom’, as displaced locals spoke of it) was a Bunyanesque target, a ...”

“... to the highest elective office in the land only 11 and a half years after becoming an MP in Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory, remarkable though that is in itself. The other reason why he is entitled to be bemused by the whole astonishing chain of events is that he is, by almost anybody’s standards, quite the least charismatic person to hold the ...”

“... help, since it wasn’t held by the courts to be an ‘official’ strike). Both books agree that Margaret Thatcher’s eventual victory enabled her to consolidate a free-market programme of deregulation that would soon merge with the wider international movement of neoliberalism. The use of violence by the state was evident in many encounters between ...”

“... A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even better, rhythms of afterthought to carry over into English. Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned, speculative prose we associate ...”

“... underpass. The housing, with its big, airy flats in the middle of London, became desirable after Margaret Thatcher introduced Right to Buy; a government office block designed by a famous architect opposite the Heygate Estate is now a tower of luxury flats. Like many of London’s more interesting spaces, Elephant and Castle ‘worked’ because of a ...”