“... they can hear his voice on the radio in the hotel bar below. He is present in this novel much as Margaret Thatcher is in The Ploughman’s Lunch – to root the story in the real. McEwan uses current affairs much as a rock band uses drums or a salesman uses a smile. The fact that Macmillan is still in power also helps us to be convinced by Florence’s ...”

“... circles met, the Atlantic, Europe and the Commonwealth, and had unique authority in the West. Margaret Thatcher has been unsophisticated in these matters and unusually atavistic. She sees that Reagan has ‘nothing between the ears, poor dear’, but has consistently given him unnecessary support. She has refused to accept the implications of Europe. And ...”

“... and theatre clubs, Surrealism, steel furniture, faintly obscure poetry’ were among the things Rose Macaulay singled out as characterising the ‘decorative, intelligent, extravagant’ 1920s. In 1919 the Women’s Engineering Society was founded and Nancy Astor became the first female MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. A year later Oxford began ...”

“... and William Carlos Williams, but also to various editors and patrons: to the somewhat mysterious Margaret Cravens, a Paris-based piano student from Madison, Indiana, who in 1910 bestowed on Pound an annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the ...”

“... style of dress was about as plain and godly as that of Lady Gaga. It is equally odd, as Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s splendid new book meticulously points out, that another is still William Shakespeare.The truth is that, for all the enthusiastic assertions of Major Longden and his ilk, Shakespeare has always been somewhat miscast in the role of ...”

“... Mabey takes issue with the common characterisation of John as ‘oppressive and cruel’, blaming Margaret Lane’s biographical essay of 1957. Lane, who as well as being a novelist, biographer and countess was president of the Jane Austen Society (along with the Johnson Society, Brontë Society and Dickens Fellowship), claimed that Thompson, like Austen (and ...”

“... or indeed her Daniel Deronda: a man she admired and desired was not something her imagination rose to, as it did to the image of other women. Quoting Dolores Rosenblum, Tess Cosslett remarks on the ‘silent, iconic female face’ that haunts Victorian male art, an image that Elizabeth Barrett perhaps consciously sought to dispel when dwelling on Marian ...”

“... in such quantities that they die on the spot. Fourteen crewmen of the half-submerged merchantman Margaret succumbed after fishing up a pipe of brandy from the hold; 15 men of the frigate Blanche died of rum on the coast of France, leaving their more fortunate mates to be locked up for seven years, until Napoleon’s fall. There were worse forms of captivity ...”

“... and alliances. James’s decision in 1502 to seek peace with England, sealed by his marriage to Margaret Tudor, Henry VII’s daughter, the next year, was a pragmatic one. The match, lauded by Dunbar as the marriage of ‘the Thistle and the Rose’, didn’t mean stable peace let alone a friendship between Tudors and ...”

“... Britain’s Jews was relatively secure, became more problematic as social and political tensions rose. The Jewish population, around 60,000 in 1880, was 180,000 by 1905; anti-Jewish sentiment also increased. There were claims that East European Jews were essentially un-English and unassimilable and that Britain should avoid ‘a premature fusion with ...”

“... 56 per cent voted to remain in the EU. Along the border with the Republic of Ireland, that figure rose to 65 per cent, though many in these parts did not cast their vote. ‘I didn’t understand it,’ one local man, Mervyn Johnston, told me. On the map, the village of Pettigo, where Johnston lives, is all but obliterated by the strong red line of the border ...”

“... One reason was that nobody was prepared to give Mrs Thatcher bad news. Poor Cecil knew that ‘Margaret, with her deep commitment to nuclear power, would never wear it.’ At the last minute, reality broke through: the nuclear power stations were withdrawn from the sale and transferred to Nuclear Electric, which remained, for the time being, in public ...”

“... noticed the hitherto undirected members of the chorus uneasily wandering about the stage. He rose from his seat, rushed down to the front of the stalls to call a halt while he told them what to do. But operas are not so easily stopped as plays and the orchestra ploughed on relentlessly, with Gielgud trying to make himself heard. Suddenly his voice ...”

“... and the ‘family’, shimmying back and forth between the two as political expediency demanded. Margaret Thatcher made the conflation explicit in her notorious claim in 1987: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’ Cooper quotes Milton and Rose Friedman, who were ...”

“... most consistent of all Byron’s doxies’. He quotes Byron’s own reminiscence of his cousin, Margaret Parker, ‘one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings’, only to round off the paragraph by observing that Margaret Parker ‘took evanescence to the limit by dying’. Biographer and subject could hardly be ...”