“... criticism of the state bureaucracy over the past twenty years has come from people – like Margaret Thatcher – who felt excluded from it, or patronised by it, on grounds of class. Her revenge on the whole Civil Service was diabolical. Bonding is not very useful if it leaves the unbonded – especially the powerful unbonded – feeling so ...”

“... fat fee by Paul Johnson, former editor of the New Statesman and later chief jester at the court of Margaret Thatcher. Laurie Flynn tells us that Johnson managed to complete his panegyric without a single interview with a migrant miner. Nor did he mention ‘the migrant labour system, low wages, anti-union attitudes, poor food, bad housing, inadequate ...”

“... His air of ordinary-bloke humility contrasted with his large and, for adherents of the post-Thatcher consensus, unsettling ideas. Unsettling not so much in respect of the future as of the past – he now doubts, he says, fundamental assumptions made by British governments since 1979, including Labour governments, some of which he served in as a cabinet ...”

“... inexorably towards 30 June 1997, and its handing-back to Communist China. Ever since 1982, when Margaret Thatcher travelled to the Middle Kingdom to set the whole 1997 question alight, Hong Kong has been living through interesting – that is to say, difficult – times. In September 1984, when Britain and China signed the Joint Declaration on the ...”

“... chemists recruited to the Lyons ice cream factory to test new and cheaper recipes was the young Margaret Roberts, whose photograph – she’s seen staring fixedly at a glass flask in the Lyons laboratory – went round the world when, as Margaret Thatcher, she became prime minister in 1979.Diverging interests ...”

“... no doubt rightly, but not Beatrice Webb. Susan Anthony, Emily Balch, Carrie Catt, Mary Lease, Margaret Sanger – all these appear on the American side, balanced (if that is the right word) by no less than three Pankhursts (Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia). John P. Altgeld, not perhaps a household name, is given a good write-up as ‘a pioneer ...”

“... to attempt the virtually impossible task of getting to the right of New Labour was anyway futile. Margaret Thatcher said, not in her ‘Mummy returns’ speech at Plymouth during the election campaign but shortly before her fall in 1990: ‘Do not say it is time for something else! Thatcherism is not for a decade. It is for centuries!’ That showed not ...”

“... usually expressed more forcefully by a fearsome, chauffeur-driven auntie figure, as played by Margaret Rutherford, or, in Deedes’s own life, by Margaret Thatcher. Journalists love him – always have loved him – because he is so much one of them. When editor of the Daily Telegraph he horrified the paper’s ...”

“... are the ones who are arguing for the introduction of a yet more repressive Obscenity Bill. Margaret Thatcher herself voted for the last one, with all its imperfections. Following on its defeat, she has promised that the Government will support the next one. The threat is real. The Bill was based on a new definition of obscenity: ‘that which a ...”

“... could, I suppose, be said that there is a significant difference between the active willingness of Margaret Thatcher to tolerate high unemployment for the sake of reining in inflation and Stanley Baldwin’s passive acquiescence in it as something which could only be cured by an upturn in the trade cycle. But it isn’t as if ...”

“... probably not have lasted so long without the final boost it got from the Falklands War in 1982. Margaret Thatcher permanently destroyed many of the supports of Britishness, but concealed this damage by Churchillian leadership and her personal ultra-fervent royalism. Once that wore off, the profounder current of disintegration resumed, and gathered ...”

“... into the depths where Bobby Sands (Terry’s equivalent of Ugolino) gnaws at the head of Margaret Thatcher. In 2010 Terry produced a postmodern rewrite of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, where notes by editors, bits from newspapers and Shakespeareish phrases are mashed up with Joysprick: ‘Not marcasite nor the gilded moolvees/Of the Prince of ...”

“... Bernard Ingham, who, as Downing Street’s Press Secretary, must rank as the source closest to Mrs Thatcher. ‘I only wish,’ he has said, ‘I was as sophisticated, as devilishly clever and Machiavellian as some make out. Not even a combination of Einstein backed by the world’s most advanced computer could achieve the presentational coups with which we ...”

“... credibility after the collapse of Communism in 1989, and its pervasiveness explains why, in 1990, Margaret Thatcher, who was otherwise a great supporter of the secret services, could disagree so strongly with Percy Cradock, Chairman of the JIC, over his assessment of Gorbachev. To Cradock he represented the old threat of Communism, which could only be ...”

“... Of the monuments of the Thatcher era, one of the most intriguing is a small file card, on which are written four pairs of words: Discord-Harmony, Error-Truth, Doubt-Faith, Dispair [sic]-Hope. These are the bones of the prayer attributed (not very plausibly) to St Francis of Assisi that Margaret Thatcher quoted on the steps of 10 Downing Street on her first day as prime minister, 4 May 1979: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony ...”