• "This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated" - Personnel officer at ICI when rejecting her for a job in 1948.
  • "Mrs Thatcher is doing for monetarism what the Boston Strangler did for door-to-door salesmen" - ex-Labour Chancellor Denis Healey, 1977.
  • "She is trying to wear the trousers of Winston Churchill" - Leonid Brezhnev, 1979.
  • "Attila the Hen" - Former Liberal MP Sir Clement Freud, 1979.
  • "She is clearly the best man among them" - Barbara Castle referring, in her diaries, to the Tory front bench.
  • "Politicians are either warriors or healers. Margaret Thatcher is a healer" - Patrick Cosgrave in his biography of Thatcher.
  • "She has been beastly to the Bank of England, has demanded that the BBC 'set its house in order' and tends to believe the worst of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag" - Tory MP Julian Critchley, 1982.
  • "She has no imagination, and that means no compassion" - ex-Labour leader Michael Foot, 1982.
  • "She approaches the problem of our country with all the one-dimensional subtlety of a comic strip" - Denis Healey, 1979.
  • "She sounded like the book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers" - TV presenter Clive James describing Thatcher on television, 1979.
  • "Plunder Woman" - Union leader Harry Unwin at TUC, 1980.
  • "She is the Enid Blyton of economics. Nothing must be allowed to spoil her simple plots" - Liberal Democrat peer Lord Holme, 1980.
  • "For the past few months she has been charging about like some bargain-basement Boadicea" - Denis Healey, 1982.
  • "I am thoroughly in favour of Mrs Thatcher's visit to the Falklands. I find a bit of hesitation, though, about her coming back" - Lawyer, playwright John Mortimer, 1983.
  • "She is the best man in England" - Ronald Reagan, 1983.