- Used Book in Good Condition.
Amazon Guest Review of “Margaret Thatcher”
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By Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum Anne Applebaum is the author of several books,
including Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, a
National Book Award finalist, and Gulag: A History, which won the
2004 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. She writes a column
for The Washington Post and Slate, and is the Director of
Political Studies at the Legatum Institute in London. She divides
her time between Britain and Poland, where her husband, Radek
Sikorski, serves as Foreign Minister.
From the beginning she sounded different. She looked different
too, particularly back when she had frizzy hair and wore too much
jewelry…
Much has happened since then. She became the Iron Lady, she
became prime minister, she became a symbol to love or hate, she
became an “ism”…We all think we know what happened to her and
why—but do we really?
Moore’s great gift is his ability to make Thatcher’s story fresh
again, and above all to remind us of how odd she was. By
beginning at the beginning, by showing us the reality of the
childhood we only know through clichés—“grocer’s daughter,”
“scholarship girl”—by introducing us to the boyfriends we’ve
never met and by quoting from her chatty, breathless letters to
her sister (“I decided to buy a really nice undie-set to go under
my turquoise chiffon blouse”) Moore shows us how impossible it
would have been for anyone who knew her as a young woman to
imagine what she would become.
He also captures her unsettling personality, her “actressy”
manner, her stiffness in public, her private warmth, her inept
outbursts and faux pas, almost always using the language of
people who were there at the time. During the decade and a half
he worked on this authorized biography—of which this is only the
first volume—Moore had unprecedented access to her private
papers, on condition that nothing be published until after her
death. He interviewed just about everyone who knew Thatcher, from
her private secretaries to her political enemies, and he did so
meticulously. This enabled Moore to produce not a hagiography or
a court biography, as some feared he would, but a multi-faceted
picture of a compelling and unusual life.
Moore is at his best when presenting different views of the same
situation. Some of these contradictory impressions are explained
by the fact that she was female in an almost entirely male world.
In later years, many assumed she had no interest in other women
or awareness of herself as a role model, but Moore shows over and
over again that this was not the case.
Her oddity was also connected to her brilliance, another one of
her qualities now lost beneath layers of history and controversy.
Thatcher got to Oxford from Grantham not because she had
connections but because she worked incredibly hard, even
overcoming objections from a teacher who told her to forget
Oxford because “you haven’t got Latin.” She said, “I’ll get
Latin” and went to take lessons from a Latin teacher at a local
boy’s school. Later, she passed the Bar exam after studying tax
law on her own.
The same autodidactic instinct impelled her to study economic
and political theory. Although this is very much a narrative
biography, it is also a thematic book about ideas: where they
come from, how they affect people and how they get shaped into
policies. And Thatcher proved unusually receptive to what were
then very unfashionable ideas. In the summer of 1968, when the
rest of the world was turning on and dropping out, she was in her
suburban sitting room reading library books on Conservative
political philosophy.
In the end, this combination of biography and intellectual
history works perfectly. After all, Thatcher’s ideas were shaped
by the place where she was born, by the people she met, by Oxford
in the 1940s and Finchley in the 1950s, by her quirkiness and her
brilliance, by her provinciality and her romantic choices. To
understand what happened to Britain during her prime ministership
and afterwards, it really is important to understand who she was:
Moore’s Thatcher will now become the definitive account.