It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.

If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.