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“... to herself as ‘head of state’ and talking of ‘I, as a government’. Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson may have fulminated against her, in the course of reviewing this book, but they helped launch the good ship Thatcher and sailed in her fatly for many a year, long sustaining and defending her against those who objected from the outset to government ...”

“... against real subversion, IRA bombs or Islamic extremists plotting biological death against the West. This is the problem which lies at the root of Britain’s form of secrecy. If we had not been so hostile to secrecy, the fact of it would not have had to be kept as secret as it was. The liberal prejudice against secrecy originated in the 19th ...”

“... union duties. Communism had enjoyed currency for some time among Scots miners. For many years West Fife, the largest coalfield in Scotland – all of it now closed – was represented by the Communist MP, Willie Gallagher. I remember walking with McGahey and the print union leader, Bill Keys, through the centre of Birmingham to one of the last big rallies ...”

“... madonna of bother, into everlasting power.Iain Sinclair, 27 February 1992 The picture which Nigel Lawson draws of Thatcher herself is a remarkable testimony to the manner in which her government’s grand strategy was determined. Increasingly, ideas were translated into policy via will, whim and pique. The advice of responsible ministers was superseded ...”

“... posed in front of a provincial isolation hospital: period domesticity verging on John Wyndham or Nigel Kneale. Conventional pieties. The dress, the white shirt and ironed tie, the pipe. Such serenity summons up, for a generation queasy with paranoia, biological experiments, government-funded research, something nasty behind metal-frame ...”

“... in climate change because they were freezing cold this winter and trust what Donald Trump or Nigel Farage tells them on Fox News or the BBC. I mean the people who stand to gain from the Trump administration’s America First Energy Plan, which will increase US dependence on fossil fuels: more fracking, more coal-mining, more pipelines. There’s nothing ...”

“... life (without her piety having much visible impact on her conduct). Every time she flew off to the West Indies, she would first go down to the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy to receive Communion from Eric Abbott, the former dean of Westminster. On her deathbed, Archbishop Carey came to give her Communion and left her a bottle of olive oil which his wife Eileen ...”

“... of the vote in round one of the 2012 presidential election. (It performed even better in the north-west and south-east in round one of the regionals last December.) At first sight, he argues, the FN looks anti-egalitarian – it wants to push migrants’ descendants to the bottom, or simply out – but it is also anti-authoritarian, in as much as it rejects ...”

“... and, one presumes, living quarters for the many employees. It’s cheering to think that, if Nigel Slater is to be believed re residential catering establishments, the young people who largely staff the place will be screwing each other rotten. Not that there’s a hint of that front of house, which is chaste, cheerful, middle-aged, middle-class and ...”

“... His diplomatic contacts seem to be largely Soviet, East European and African: he usually mentions West European political parties, left or right, with scorn: ‘the German social democratic party just wants to join the Adenauer coalition. They have no guts or sense of purpose and are licked before they start.’ Though this is very much a political diary, his ...”

“... Struggling with his maps, the writer is forced into sheer itinerary: They drove directly south-west into Algeria through Guelma, Bou Saada, Ain Sefra, Colomb Béchar near the Moroccan frontier, Tindouf, into Mauritania through Chinguetta, and reached the Atlantic coast at Nouakshott. Then down the coast to St Louis in Senegal. At Dakar they cut sharply ...”

“... The high moral tone adopted by bankers and industrialists infuriated struggling farmers in the West and South, state legislators in the Midwest, unemployed manufacturing workers and the proprietors of small businesses. ‘When J. Pierpont Morgan, the patron of bishops and exalted pillar of the church, is at his devotions does he think of the starving ...”

“... Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by the syphilis of time, played so well, on an anvil of whitewashed cement, alongside a municipal ...”

“... prefigured where the swing to Labour would be greatest, even those constituencies, like Bristol West (William Waldegrave’s seat), where Labour would come from third place to win. Why were we so ready to discount this overwhelming weight of evidence? The obvious answer is 1992 – once bitten twice shy. That is a good reason; but there are, I think, two ...”

“... and G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could just as usefully have been a lot shorter. Nigel Smith is fascinating on ‘The uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’ and Peter Burke’s little sketch of post-Medieval uses of Latin is wide-ranging and excellent. Other chapters suffer from being wide-ranging and bad. Victor Kiernan’s ‘Languages ...”