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“... and all mediated through her father. First came the moral ethic of judgmental Methodism. Young Margaret was sent to Sunday school in the morning before accompanying her parents to chapel; and was then expected to attend Sunday school again in the afternoon, though let off the evening service. Then there was the economic ethic of the family grocery ...”

“... brightest hopes for the future. When he and Sir Edward Boyle were brought into the Cabinet by Macmillan on ‘the Night of the Long Knives’, it was with a flourish – the old showman’s theatrical salute to youth and brains. Joseph, as Minister of Housing and Local Government with a background in the construction industry, became the booster of the ...”

“... Reith: ‘One cannot,’ he said, ‘be impartial between the fire and the fire brigade.’ Harold Macmillan is widely credited with being a TV ‘natural’. Mr Cockerell’s account makes him out to be anything but that. Huw Weldon observed after his first broadcast as prime minister that the script ‘could not be spoken by one human being to another ...”

“... that Heseltine is a bit of a wrong ’un, and it started long before he did so much to end Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. There was the time that he didn’t lie to the Commons but certainly misled it over the Hovertrain affair. There are the silly gestures, such as picking up the Mace, which was meant to appear patriotic and committed but merely ...”

“... concert which starred the cast of Beyond the Fringe. At the gig, Peter Cook performed his Harold Macmillan routine, comparing the four-minute warning before a nuclear strike to Roger Bannister’s mile record (‘I’d like you to know that in this great country of ours a man can run a mile in four minutes’). In August I joined the Fawcett family at the ...”

“... in such a position himself was, however, mocked by his subsequent marital experience. His own wife Margaret was to prove as susceptible as Connie. First it was one of Alan’s pupils at Oxford, Robert Kee, for whom Margaret fell – it was the outbreak of war – in a way that embarrassed both men but naturally hurt her ...”

“... it was the product of a mind at once practical and imaginative. Throughout, as my then boss, Andy MacMillan, put it, Mackintosh ‘demonstrates a creative exploitation of each and every specific requirement, seizing the opportunity to create an architectural “event” through some feat of invention’. The thought of any part of the GSA being damaged is ...”

“... information it affords us very little. He treats major events like the Profumo affair and Harold Macmillan’s bloodstained reshuffle of 1963, the Night of the Long Knives (contrasted with Mrs Thatcher’s ten-year extravenous drip), with an airy flap of the wrist and one and a quarter pages. Such matters are unworthy, not to be bothered with. Like German ...”

“... Christine Keeler votes Conservative. She would, wouldn’t she? Having seen off the Macmillan Government in the 1960s, exposed the squalid underbelly of upper-class public life and fired the starting pistol to begin the sexual revolution by revealing that ‘You’ve never had it so good’ was actually ‘You’ve never had it so often,’ she reckons she knows what’s what about the world of politics and power (though sex and men are not really her thing ...”

“... this question dominated the politics of 1993. It had done the same in 1962, the year the Macmillan Government sought terms for entry into the Community; in 1972, when the Heath Government negotiated British membership; and in 1975, when the Wilson Government held a referendum. The referendum, in which 64 per cent of the voters said Yes, was supposed ...”

“... popular genre which has taken up an awful lot of shelf-space in recent years – the shedunit. Margaret Thatcher’s paramountcy remains ‘the only plausible answer’ after more than three hundred pages which have tracked the experience of the Eighties. ‘Scarcely any of the great institutions remained untouched by Thatcherism in its various ...”

“... for Expansion, presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mrs Margaret Thatcher), December 1972. I do not think that irrevocable damage has yet been done, but I do regard the situation as alarming in the sense that the contribution made by Britain to world science will be severely reduced if the factors now operating are ...”

“... Picture of Dorian Gray), the theatre designer Percy Anderson, and ‘the Ranee of Sarawak’, Lady Margaret Brooke. He knew Wilde, and developed flirtatious friendships with the much older playwright and composer Hamilton Aïdé and with Henry James, who looked back wistfully years later on ‘something – ah, so tender! – in me that was only quite ...”

“... But while it may be true that he needled Tory as well as Labour administrations, provoking Harold Macmillan to inquire of his minister of defence what could be done to ‘suppress or even get rid of Mr Chapman Pincher’, his outlook and instincts were profoundly reactionary. The left for him meant the Soviet Union and the spies, MPs and trade unionists he ...”

“... What Tory MPs really wanted,’ Margaret Thatcher writes of the Westland affair, ‘was leadership, frankness and a touch of humility, all of which I tried to provide.’ A great deal of indignant energy has fired the reviews of this book, many of them by Mrs Thatcher’s former Cabinet colleagues, largely because of the sheer outrageousness of those claims to frankness and humility ...”