“... His hero reached his conclusion all by himself, he insists. On the other hand, he didn’t tell Margaret about his conversion. If he had, says Anderson, ‘she would have lost all faith in his judgment of foreign affairs, and in her own favourable assessment of his merits.’ But when Mr Major returned to the Treasury as Chancellor, this time stepping over ...”

“... and Julian Maclaren-Ross, and wrote with sufficient extra-historical purchase to make it into Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature (to his immoderate delight). His memoirs were a Book at Bedtime. He received the Légion d’honneur, was an FBA and a CBE. His birthday was in the Times. Cobb’s professional distinction was remarkable ...”

“... the way of business or horse-racing should distress nobody. She has no need to be impressed by ‘Margaret Drabble and other highbrows’ at informal Buckingham Palace luncheons. The monarch’s business is with practice and not with theory. It is we who have to get our ideas straight. The notion of a ‘royal biography’ is itself part of the kit of ...”

“... maiden. Reviewing the experiment in the early 1890s, the publishing establishment, under Frederick Macmillan, determined that free trade in books had not worked and that something radical must be done. The time was propitious. The 1890s saw the formation of the Booksellers’ Association, the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors, and the first ...”

“... churches, families and firms. As Rodgers points out, even Hayek’s most influential student, Margaret Thatcher, when she stated that ‘there is no such thing as society,’ added a rider regarding the irreducibly social and institutional nature of humanity: ‘There are individual men and women and there are families.’ In this, she was merely echoing ...”

“... Adamson, the secretary of state for Scotland, telling the senior Scottish law officer, Hugh Macmillan, a Conservative, that he would be ‘surprised to find what a Tory’ Adamson was. Torrance also notes that, while some Labour figures tried to construct a more progressive justification for Britain’s imperial role, in practice, notably in Iraq and ...”

“... to sleep again, anyway, not dozing, no forty winks, but deeply, fast, vastly asleep. And as the Macmillan Nurse booklets (every patient’s and, it seems, every doctor’s source of information) explain, this fatigue is not alleviated by rest. You wake up just as exhausted as you were when you went to sleep. In an aside, they say that the fatigue can last ...”

“... 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 flinty ...”

“... announced post-referendum by Nigel Lawson from his home in France: to ‘finish the job that Margaret Thatcher started’.Daisy HildyardFarmers,​ who were divided by the Brexit vote, are reliant on the EU for regulation, migrant labour and handouts. Financial support payments are currently distributed using a system which has become notorious for its ...”

“... win the miners an astonishing breadth of public support during the national strike of 1972. Harold Macmillan, who as MP for Stockton in the Thirties had referred indignantly to the ‘Passchendaele’ of the South-West Durham coalfield, gave moving expression to these feelings, in his last public speech, when intervening on behalf of the miners during the ...”

“... by fear, courage, conviction, inertia, envy, vanity and panic, too. There has also been, as Harold Macmillan remarked when asked to say what had guided his premiership, the force of ‘events, dear boy, events’. It would be an impressive historian who, at this short distance in time, succeeded in mastering the complexity of all this. Yergin and Stanislaw ...”

“... at any rate appear to be, so many more of them than there were. Some may attribute the change to Margaret Thatcher, with her outspoken determination to roll back the encroaching state, her vehement belief in free, competitive markets, her implacable hostility to the trade unions, and her famous remark that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ But as ...”

“... years is reaching the point of crisis. The party in power, whose late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space. In effect, if not in explicit intention, it is a ...”

“... economy which not so long ago was envied or feared at least for some of its achievements. Harold Macmillan has a passage in his memoirs recalling the worries he expressed to President Kennedy over the imminent failure of the capitalist system, beaten not just by Yuri Gagarin in Soyuz One, but by the guarantee being offered to the Soviet people of a higher ...”

“... Government discouraged and resisted black immigration (though it didn’t suggest, as Harold Macmillan had during the war, that black Britons should be issued with Union Jack badges). After 1945 most recruitment drives were directed at Europeans; ministers even briefly considered moving the Windrush passengers on to East Kenya, to work on the Groundnuts ...”