Kwasi Kwarteng

Mrs Thatcher not only made history by becoming Britain’s first female prime minister, she was the first woman to hold any comparable position in the western world."

Using food as a way of understanding empire is highly effective. Food knows no barriers of race, gender or even time.

For the British working class, the restrictions of conflict actually improved their diet. Under Lord Woolton, the minister for food, a programme of free school meals was introduced. Priority supplies of milk were provided for pregnant women and nursing mothers, while orange juice, milk and cod liver oil were given to the under-fives.

From the start of her leadership of the Conservative party in February 1975, Thatcher’s style seemed shrill and uncompromising, and she became an easy object of mockery. When she left office nearly 16 years later, she was a widely recognised, but clearly still highly controversial, figure."

The contrast between a figure such as Mark Zuckerberg, a billionaire before he was 30, and Alfred Krupp, who spent 60 years building one of the biggest manufacturing concerns in the world, is striking.

But while the British empire is easy to write about, it is very difficult to summarise. This is because what we call 'empire' spans 400 years in time and thousands of miles in space; every continent on Earth was directly affected by it.

I don't see how a lowering of VAT helps much, in terms of stimulus. VAT is a form of sales tax. It gets paid when you spend. A stimulus should put money in your pocket before you have actually spent the money.

I've always thought my main concern is to alleviate the burdens on people, who were earning less money, perhaps than £80,000."

The idea that historians aren’t affected by what goes on around them I think is slightly fanciful.

I remember being told after the 1992 general election that Labour could never win a majority in Britain ever again.

The British in South Africa always portrayed themselves as more enlightened and tolerant than the 'narrow-minded', 'intolerant' Boers.

In Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Angola and Cameroon maize is a staple, yet the earliest mention of maize in west Africa comes from a Portuguese document that lists it as being loaded on to slave ships bound for Africa.