“... TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video nasty. Young male novelists routinely seek to give maximum offence. Martin Amis did so in 1975 by calling a novel Dead Babies. In The Wasp Factory Banks recounted acts of child-on-child sadism ...”

“... end of an empire was obviated by Deng Xiaoping, who unveiled his radical sounding solution to Margaret Thatcher, on her visit to Beijing in September 1982: ‘one country, two systems, for at least fifty years.’ Mrs Thatcher later called it ‘an ingenious idea’. Deng Xiaoping claimed it as an improbable mix of ...”

“... Kinnock for the party leadership, despite the opposition of some members of the group, including Margaret Beckett and Chris Mullin. Benn describes himself as ‘peaceful in my own mind’ about this outcome because it had been a collective decision, not an act of personal vanity. Corbyn’s chairmanship of the group helped salve his conscience. Benn was less ...”

“... a breach of Parliamentary privilege. Hamilton untied that knot at once. Supported by Lady Thatcher, Lord Archer and the entire Parliamentary Tory Party, he conspired to force through Parliament an amendment to the Defamation Act which allows MPs to waive their privilege in order to sue for libel. Backed by his new law, Hamilton charged back into court ...”

“... was introduced after the flotation of telephones, gas and water because it was, according to Thatcher, ‘the most technically and politically difficult privatisation’. The Government’s audacity in embarking on the electricity sell-off should not be underemphasised: this kind of project had not been tried in any other major industrialised ...”

“... surviving colliery in the 1984-85 strike, who was so committed to the miners’ struggle against Margaret Thatcher that he led a band of pickets out to sea in a small boat to try to stop an oil tanker, became Blyth Valley’s MP in 1987. He won the seat seven times after that, hewing to his communitarian principles, his belief in socialism and a ...”

“... the postwar order offer some clues. (I should say that I know both the authors.) Guy Ortolano’s Thatcher’s Progress tracks the passage ‘from social democracy to market liberalism’ through the history of Milton Keynes, the last and largest of Britain’s postwar ‘new towns’. Ortolano calls the new towns the ‘spatial dimension’ of the postwar ...”

“... me with the machinery of my investigation and informed me of the name of my natural mother – Margaret Walsh – which my adoptive mother had only ever hazarded or garbled. But after a few days in the Family Records Centre in London, it was clear that there’d be work to do: the number of Margaret Walshes qualifying as ...”

“... Labour offered in the past,’ he writes ‘was not appropriate for 1992 and beyond ... The Thatcher years had made people more self-reliant and that “dimension” must be accommodated in Labour’s approach.’ As usual, there is no attempt to prove this. Who precisely was made ‘more self-reliant’ during the ‘...”

“... devices. The classroom freedom we had in the most difficult state schools was exactly what both Thatcher and New Labour set out to eradicate with quantification. There were no league tables of schools, or SATs to see how teachers and pupils were doing, just CSEs (as they were then), for which in my school expectations were tragically low. There was a small ...”

“... new bathroom – a deep overhaul of their broken-down old water supply and sewer system – it was Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government that made the call. They couldn’t have got it more wrong. Eight out of ten people opposed water privatisation, but Thatcher privatised it anyway. In the ...”

“... came with me and we spent a very pleasant day at Bard. My fellow honorands included the novelist Margaret Drabble, the exceptionally learned ancient historian, Professor Momigliano, who had been a colleague of mine for many years at University College, London, and Professor Kolakowski whom I first met at a congress in Warsaw in 1957 when he was still a ...”

“... of selection in the 1950s and 1960s; as secretary of state for education in the early 1970s, Margaret Thatcher oversaw the establishment of more comprehensives than any minister from either party; Keith Joseph initiated moves towards replacing the old divide between O levels and CSEs with GCSEs to be taken by all, a key step in expanding sixth forms ...”

“... Henrietta Maria as a bubbly twin of Princess Diana, and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe ...”

“... car. The car has only one occupant, but it is Saul Bellow, or Madonna, or Michael Jordan, or Margaret Thatcher. What do you do? I submit that if you are seeking counsel at a crucial moment of decision the last person you want to turn to is someone who spends his time thinking up hypotheticals like this one so that he can amaze students with his ...”