“... for talks at a house in Cheyne Walk with Willie Whitelaw, the then home secretary. In 1988 Mrs Thatcher banned his voice from being broadcast but a decade later Tony Blair negotiated with him as a key participant in the peace process. Today he has easy access to the top British leadership. But Adams has not been entirely rehabilitated. In 2013 the police ...”

“... to be undertaken in the first place. The NCC’s chairman, David Pascall, is a former member of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. The former head of the Policy Unit, Lord Griffiths, now chairs the School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) which will soon be merged with NCC. It just so happens that Lord Griffiths also chairs the ...”

“... pastime, an excuse for gossip and the indulgence of forbidden fantasies. No one, not even Margaret Cleveland, his wife, the only character whose interest in her husband’s behaviour is more than merely idle (though not much more), ever imagines that Francis has any freedom actually to do anything about his passion. As Miss Maude Doggett, his ...”

“... that there is nothing new about rowdy football, but with the media getting support from Mrs Thatcher on the need to preserve law and order, the publishers (Blackwell’s in both cases) must feel that they are onto a good thing. The individual essays in the Elias/Dunning volume were designed for widely different audiences, but on their central theme of ...”

“... a sliver of that loss from council tax, which the Tory government also decided to cap.*Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s capping of the domestic rates in 1984 (something I had a small but culpable hand in at the Number Ten Policy Unit) and the abolition of the Metropolitan Counties and the Greater London Council in 1986, Tory governments have shown a ...”

“... have been better if he didn’t. One bit of learned advice to the British reader: if you hear Margaret Thatcher or her successor Big Benn speaking in the Commons on the state of the box-office in the West End, you’d better brace yourself because an English version of Dr Goebbels is surely limping his way down Whitehall – to take care of the ...”

“... from a number of prefatory pages by current admirers of Priestley such as Beryl Bainbridge and Margaret Drabble, the chief novelty of this edition is that it has been printed in large coffee-table format to accommodate the numerous photographs that have been interspersed through the text. The addition of these photos, a curious mixture of unidentified ...”

“... neglect but from a major head injury: someone has assaulted him.It is 1985, two years after Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory, the beginning of the end of the welfare state in which Lou, like so many in the postwar country, had invested her dreams. Perhaps, EastEnders suggests, this might be the real reason things are going ...”

“... the power of the state. So how could a centre-left party dream up a piece of legislation that the Thatcher Administration would have considered too extreme? The meandering path through the intellectual foothills of communitarianism taken by Blunkett in his book Politics and Progress* helps to explain the thinking behind the Bill. Even in this paean to ...”

“... poster for Madame Tussaud’s which, above a nightmarishly grinning close-up of the waxwork Mrs Thatcher flanked by an old and unamused Queen Victoria and an equally unsmiling Elizabeth I, bore the slogan: ‘Baker Street Madam Offers Domination, Correction and Discipline.’ According to the logic of this advertisement, the commercial basis of the waxworks ...”

“... to back a UN resolution declaring Argentina the aggressor. There was talk of a boycott, but Margaret Thatcher, knowing little of football or the home associations’ tournament records, calculated that their performances would improve troop morale; in the event Scotland went out in the first group phase and England and Northern Ireland in the ...”

“... pigeon feather caught on his nose) as the coaches wheel about the yard and Janine Duvitski as Margaret Nicholson rather shyly tries to assassinate the King. Afterwards I wander down the immaculately preserved High Street. Here is Coutts Bank and some smart tailor’s, established in the 18th century, there’s a grand photographer’s established around ...”

“... in Labour’s Winter of Discontent. By then, as he subsequently told her, Powell had decided that Thatcher was ‘the Answer’. Aside from her personal attractions – she reminded him of Io in her rapture with Zeus in Correggio’s painting, her voice too casting a certain spell – her political firmness won his unconditional admiration, even if all she ...”

“... politics before getting on with the play proper. The characters are largely historical. Margaret Nicholson’s attempt on the King’s life was in 1786, not just before his illness as in the play, but it is certainly true, as the King remarks, that in France she would not have got off so lightly. As it was, she lived on in Bedlam long after the ...”

“... as they were when the phrase ‘jet set’ was first coined. Concorde was built to move Princess Margaret, Noël Coward, Grace Kelly and Ian Fleming around the world. It was built to carry them to Barbados for the winter, and to New York to go shopping; to Buenos Aires to watch the polo, and to South Africa to go on safari. Since this pattern of use for air ...”