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“... a set of ideological assumptions and constraints which are not significantly different under Thatcher from what they were under Asquith and Lloyd George. This may seem a curious observation to make in the aftermath of a Conservative Budget which has reduced the marginal rate of income tax for even the richest of the idle rich to 40 per cent while numbers ...”

“... perspective of daily politics that makes one wonder whether the gap between the Tory Party of Margaret Thatcher and that of Harold Macmillan is greater than the gap between Macmillan and the third Marquess of Salisbury? We shall probably not know until she has gone whether Mrs Thatcher was an erratic episode, a ...”

“... the idea of the enemy within: not in the sense of a mole working for a foreign power, or the way Margaret Thatcher thought of the miners, but of conflicts between ambitious actors struggling for supremacy at one government agency or another. In Dead Lions, Diana Taverner, head of operations at the Park (Kristin Scott Thomas on the telly), says to a ...”

“... extravagance and flashy, often flippant style, it frequently seems heavy-handed. It opens with Margaret Thatcher pontificating about renewing the inner cities, as police shoot a black woman cooking her son’s supper; the action plays out against an apocalyptic vision of looters and rioters in burning streets. South London is a permanent (and ...”

“... simultaneous publication of their memoirs therefore affords an interesting X-ray picture of Mrs Thatcher’s governments and of a Tory Party which has altered radically under Thatcher and which, perhaps by default, now enjoys a political hegemony. I rather like Norman Tebbit. Most journalists I know who have come into ...”

“... agreed to Chevaline without telling most of the Cabinet, let alone the Labour Party, and when Margaret Thatcher with the solitary aid of Cecil Parkinson conducted the major decisions of the Falklands War. It so happens that Arthur Tedder was a distant kinsman of my father, who married, after his first wife died, my father’s ...”

“... that have enabled women to control their lives. For Bell Gale Chevigny, the biographer of Margaret Fuller, women biographers of women are surrogate daughters. ‘It is nearly inevitable,’ she notes in Daughters Writing: Towards a Theory of Women’s Biography (1984), ‘that women writing about women will symbolically reflect their internalised ...”

“... can a boy from Abersychan who acquired an accent like that be lazy?’ From Princess Margaret comes a comment on the moribundity of the London Season: ‘Every tart in London can get in.’ Kynaston appreciates the respect for working-class values which he associates with the work of Williams, Young and Richard Hoggart, and before that of ...”

“... Richmond. He joyfully extended his favours to other members of the Royal Family, such as Princess Margaret, who he once flew free to her hols in Sardinia. Reminding Ogilvy all the while of his secret share options, signed and sealed in the Bahamas, Tiny retained the services of the royal husband for 12 years – until finally Ogilvy was forced to resign in ...”

“... was asking for trouble: and the 1983 election duly delivered it. Few people can doubt that Mrs Thatcher would have faced a far more formidable foe in Healey, and it is not absurd to imagine that the election result might have been different. But the hypothesis is unreal, for if Healey had been elected leader by MPs, the Party would have been hopelessly ...”

“... reasons’ for omitting all this – we’re told that two reported conversations with Margaret Thatcher have been cut on similar grounds. Her son, Mark, isn’t spared, however, mainly because in 2005 he admitted complicity in the affair as part of a plea bargain in South Africa; and because of Mann’s animus against him. ...”

“... and Ronald Reagan. The present volume, in other words, would make soothing bedside reading for Mrs Margaret Thatcher, not least because its opening contribution comes from her favourite TV star and economist, Milton Friedman, the man for whom the British economy is now what St Paul’s was to Sir Christopher Wren: Si monumentum ...”

“... speeches of welcome made by his opposite numbers on state visits, including James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. His listeners’ ribald speculations as to just what Petkanov might have done to merit the bestowal by Queen Elizabeth II of the Order of the Bath are, so far as I can see, the only thing in The Porcupine to betray its author’s English ...”

“... to a significant minority. There are a number of ways we can write the history of Britain since Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. One – an accurate one – is to see it as a story of the remorseless corruption of the country’s elites. I don’t mean a story of paper bags filled with money – though money is central to the story – but of a ...”

“... Council, exclusive of the rabble and heavily representative of the C1s, whom Savonarola, like Margaret Thatcher, thought more in favour of upstanding morality than those above and below. The activity of the new government was to be directed to what, following Aristotle and his Dominican mentor Thomas Aquinas, Savonarola called the common good. The ...”