What others said about Margaret Thatcher:

"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 salesman" - 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 Margaret 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.