Margaret Thatcher: Herself Alone: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

Overview

The masterful and definitive biography of Britain's first female prime minister reaches its climax with the story of her zenith and her fall, and “reveals a complex figure who had a lasting and lastingly controversial impact on her country and on history" (The New York Times Book Review).

How did Margaret Thatcher change and divide Britain? How did her model of combative female leadership help shape the way we live now? How did the woman who won the Cold War and three general elections in succession find herself pushed out by her own MPs?

Charles Moore's full account, based on unique access to Margaret Thatcher herself, her papers, and her closest associates, tells the story of her last period in office, her combative retirement, and the controversy that surrounded her even in death. It includes the fall of the Berlin Wall, which she had fought for, and the rise of the modern EU that she feared. It lays bare her growing quarrels with colleagues and reveals the truth about her political assassination.

Moore's three-part biography of Britain's most important peacetime prime minister paints an intimate political and personal portrait of the victories and defeats, the iron will but surprising vulnerability of the woman who dominated in an age of male power. This is the full, enthralling story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101947210
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/12/2019
Series:	Authorized Biography of Margaret Thatcher Series , #3
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1056
File size:	232 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

CHARLES MOORE joined the staff of The Daily Telegraph in 1979, and as a political columnist in the 1980s covered several years of Mrs. Thatcher's first and second governments. He was editor of The Spectator 1984--90; editor of the Sunday Telegraph 1992--95; and editor of The Daily Telegraph 1995--2003, for which he is still a regular columnist. The first volume of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, published in 2013, won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, the HW Fisher Best First Biography Prize and Political Book of the Year at the Paddy Power Political Book Awards.

Editorial Reviews

10/21/2019

Journalist Moore (Margaret Thatcher: At Her Zenith) depicts the final decades of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s life, including her third consecutive general election victory in 1987 and the intraparty discord that led to her ouster as Conservative Party leader in 1990, in this impressive conclusion to his multivolume authorized biography. Moore presents Thatcher’s last years in power thematically, analyzing the prime minister’s beliefs and actions on the AIDS crisis; climate change (according to Moore, Thatcher did “more than any other non-American to encourage the United States towards a global, well-funded approach to climate change”); the democratization of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany; the poll tax; and the debate over England’s entry into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, among other issues. Though Moore handily dissects these political matters, his narrative structure occasionally obfuscates their interdependence as well as the wobbly nature of Thatcher’s popularity at the time. The chapters depicting her fall from power, however, are expertly wrought. Moore concludes with a portrait of Thatcher’s long health decline in her post–Downing Street years. Drawing on primary historical documents as well as firsthand interviews with key players in Thatcher’s personal and political lives, Moore delivers a frank and weighty testament to the impact of a stateswoman whose “vices were inseparable from her virtues.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

With this masterpiece, Moore has given us Margaret Thatcher. She now belongs to history.”—The New York Times Book Review (100 Notable Books of 2019)

"Splendid . . . Impressive . . . In Charles Moore this titanic figure of British history has found a biographer whose mastery of both subject and form is complete. This is a biography for the ages.”—The Wall Street Journal

“The third, and concluding, volume of this enormous biographical project . . . reveals a complex figure who had a lasting and lastingly controversial impact on her country and on history.”—The New York Times Book Review (100 Notable Books of 2019)

“Meticulously detailed portrait . . . Moore tells a personal as well as political story not usually found in biographies of world leaders . . . A thoughtful, impeccably researched account . . . Moore gives everything he can in this complete and comprehensive work.”—Booklist

“Compelling and emotionally raw . . . Some parts have a novelistic quality rarely found in the careful pages of political biographies . . . Awesome scale and thoroughness . . . Grippingly portrayed  . . . Sharp.”—The Guardian


“Excellent . . . Moore’s Margaret Thatcher is one of the truly great biographies . . . Comprehensive and subtle, breaking new ground while being surefooted on familiar terrain. He provides a portrait of Thatcher that is surprising and fresh while still convincing. This volume completes a historical masterpiece.”—The Times (UK)

From the Publisher

★ 2019-10-03
The third installment in Moore's densely packed, endlessly revealing life of the Iron Lady.

Continuing a story that, though skillfully told, runs very long, Moore begins in the late spring of 1987, when Margaret Thatcher has just won her third victory in the general election. Electoral contests in Britain, he reminds us, are "parliamentary, not presidential, and are based on parties, not individual leaders." Nevertheless, it is indisputable that Thatcher won on the strength of steely charisma and achievements that lifted British spirits, from overseeing the end of a long recession to securing victory in the Falklands War. Things were vastly different in 1990, when British voters took an overwhelmingly different view of her: They were, Moore writes, "unimpressed by divisions over Europe, the return of double-digit inflation and the perceived injustices of the poll tax." Worse yet, Thatcher had become personally unpopular as well, seen as someone who had simply stopped listening to the people. When she entered her third term, her approval rating was 52%, but at the end, it was below 33%. Spy scandals and the morale-sapping conflict in Northern Ireland did not help matters. Engineered out of the leadership of the Conservative Party by challengers such as John Major and Michael Heseltine, Thatcher was not shy about nursing grudges, considering Major to be "a nice, useless man, who cannot lead." Moore shows that her last years in office were not without their own accomplishments, including cementing a renewed relationship with the United States and helping bring about the fall of the Soviet Union and an end to the Cold War. Nonetheless, the author also points to the failures of Thatcher's brand of libertarianism, characterized by the mantra "diffuse, disperse, devolve." That strain of politics has lingering effects in a Conservative Party still tinged with Thatcherism, with such results as Brexit and the specter of a U.K. that will perhaps soon be disunited.

Very likely the last word on the late prime minister, whose legacy is still playing out in Britain today.

Kirkus Reviews