“... became even worse in the course of the decade. In September 1978, just a few months after Margaret Thatcher claimed to understand why English men and women might feel their country was being ‘swamped’ by Commonwealth immigrants, the National Front moved its central offices from Teddington in West London to Great Eastern Street, a few ...”

“... to believe that the Government’s policies are benign in inspiration. Rather the reverse. Lady Thatcher as prime minister was entirely open in her determination to destroy those quasi-constitutional conventions of British political life which underlay the hated ‘consensus’ and the country’s decline. Moreover, the language of a bastard neo-liberalism ...”

“... These issues include the nature of the political and Britain which led Galtieri’s Junta and Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet to act and react the way they did; the fact that both leaders’ political survival was at stake in the outcome; the high risks of personal diplomacy and the perils of multiple mediation. From a specifically british points of ...”

“... insular myth worries Warner, who shows how effectively it was employed by Churchill, and later by Thatcher during the Falklands war. As Warner points out, England has always been strongly related to other countries; her very survival has depended – especially during World War Two – on continuous relations with ports and products overseas. Churchill’s ...”

“... Labour Party cherishes its great partnerships – Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Douglas and Margaret Cole, the Callaghans, the Kinnocks, the Blairs. In this pantheon the touchingly loyal team of Michael and Jill may confidently be placed.’ ‘Michael and Jill’: how cosy. It seems unfair to bracket Glenys Kinnock, say, with Beatrice Webb and ...”

“... better: in each case a passport to more than a decade in power. Much the same could be said of the Thatcher era. By taking office in 1979, the Conservatives got their hands on North Sea oil to back their great gamble in economic policy. They also had, of course, the bonus of a divided opposition, with both the Labour Party and the Liberal-SDP Alliance ...”

“... quoted by Hunter, ‘is a quarrier, mason, woodman, carrier … carpenter, cooper, turf-cutter, thatcher … farmer, cattle dealer, poacher and God knows what.’ Such indeed was the variety of skills that supported life before the factory system and which was now to be systematically and explicitly done away with. In a croft house a few miles from the ...”

“... the passionate Rosine flees in her lionlike robe, an opposed figure is brought into focus. This is Margaret, a phosphorescent product of the mass media whose ‘severed head’ (‘repeated, televised, pearlised’) parodies and usurps the presence of exiled Rosine. The conquest seems complete, for with the coming of ...”

“... expected – Anguilla on a wider stage, with penguins. Events which soon followed, ending with Mrs Thatcher taking the salute at a victory parade, have made it hard to remember why it all at first seemed so comic. But the early incredulity often made points which were lost when solemn passions took over. I remember an editorial conference, the Task Force ...”

“... Bennite Left under New Labour underlines the point: stalwarts from the early 1980s – Tony Banks, Margaret Beckett, Jeremy Corbyn, Michael Meacher, Clare Short, Gavin Strang – have been given only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their ...”

“... the disturbances in the Toxteth neighbourhood in 1981, Michael Heseltine, then a member of Thatcher’s cabinet, argued that ‘tactical retreat, a combination of economic erosion and encouraged evacuation’, had been going on in Liverpool for decades, and was at least partly the result of government policy. He thought he could turn the city ...”

“... and must never be fought.’Reagan’s​ overall legacy is more problematic. Along with his pal Margaret Thatcher, he played a central role in implementing a corrosive neoliberal agenda that privatised much of the public sector and dismantled the welfare state. We have yet to recover from the damage done, as societies on both sides of the Atlantic grow ...”

“... interests; it is a meeting of minds between types of statesman or stateswoman. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were self-consciously the last great leaders in the nation-state tradition, even though it was their regimes that broke the link between the state and welfare. George W. Bush and Tony Blair are ‘among the first market-state political ...”

“... elective leadership has successively elevated meritocratic, professional politicians – Heath, Thatcher and Major – who could never have ‘emerged’ from the old pre-elective system, and such politicians, lacking anything else to fall back on, do not quit gracefully. This means that every leadership election is an attempted regicide; and so the Tory ...”

“... too old to run for the job (55 was the limit).Journalists and other commentators have focused on Thatcher and Scargill when writing about Britain’s late coal age; Robert Gildea’s Backbone of the Nation is more interested in the experience of the miners: working underground; feeding and clothing a household; and, most of all, organising the dispute and ...”