Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography—from Grantham to the Falklands
Charles Moore. Knopf, $35 (912p) ISBN 978-0-307-95894-5
Britain’s Iron Lady seems less metallic and more human in this sprawling but supple biography (the first of two volumes). Journalist Moore’s richly detailed narrative, which follows the U.K.’s first female prime minister to her midterm triumph in the Falklands War, portrays a multidimensional, conflicted figure: an idealistic woman of modest background but with a taste for fashion and Tory high life; a feminist pioneer determined to conquer a man’s world but with a fondness for housewifery (she sometimes cooked for her husband while she was running the country, and conflated macroeconomics with home economics); a rock-ribbed ideologue who secretly bent toward caution and compromise (Moore shows how, in spite of her unyielding rhetoric, she was a negotiator, working with IRA hunger-strikers and an Argentine dictator). Moore’s authorized but clear-eyed treatment benefits from prickly interviews with his subject before her death and access to papers and youthful letters; he’s sympathetic to Thatcher, but highlights her flaws and failures with astuteness and a dry wit. Her success in battling unions, an entrenched welfare state, and a clubby establishment in her efforts to shove Britain rightward made her a conservative icon, but Moore demonstrates how wavering that struggle was; rather than a stentorian stalwart, his Thatcher is a mix of instinctive principle, half-formed doctrine, and hesitant calculation, groping her way toward a new dispensation. 24 pages of b&w photos. (May 21)
