Margaret Thatcher 的傳記或回憶錄的中文本十幾年前看過

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The Downing Street Years

The New York Times bestselling memoirs of Margaret Thatcher provide a riveting inside look at her role as a world leader and the events and personalities that shaped her years as Britain's prime minister.

2011年的電影鐵娘子 現在在HBO 放映

The Iron Lady

British cinema poster

The Iron Lady is a 2011 British biographical film based on the life of Margaret Thatcher, the longest serving Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of the 20th century.^[3] The film was directed by Phyllida Lloyd. Thatcher is portrayed primarily by Meryl Streep,^[4] but also, in her formative and early political years, by Alexandra Roach. Thatcher's husband, Denis Thatcher, is portrayed by Jim Broadbent, and Thatcher's longest-serving cabinet member and eventual deputy, Geoffrey Howe, is portrayed by Anthony Head.^[5]
While the film was met with mixed reviews, Streep's performance was widely acclaimed, and considered to be one of the finest of her career. She received her 17th Academy Award nomination and ultimately the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Thatcher across four decades. She also earned her third Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama (eighth overall), and her second BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

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Details: 2011, UK, Cert 12A, 104 mins, Drama, Dir: Phyllida Lloyd

With: Alexandra Roach, Anthony Head, Harry Lloyd, Jim Broadbent, Meryl Streep, Olivia Coleman, Olivia Colman, Richard E Grant, Roger Allam

Summary: A biopic of the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher

Our reviews

Philip French
A portrait of Margaret Thatcher from colossus to recluse is distinguished by Meryl Streep's superb central performance, writes Philip French
Peter Bradshaw

Despite a note-perfect performance by Meryl Streep, the Margaret Thatcher biopic lacks much cutting edge, writes Peter Bradshaw
Xan Brooks

Phyllida Lloyd's film gives us Thatcher without Thatcherism, writes Xan Brooks, but Meryl Streep is astonishing

Meryl Streep wins best actress Oscar for Iron Lady performance

Meryl Streep, the clear frontrunner for many weeks, wins the best actress Oscar at the 84th Academy Awards ceremony
The Iron Lady's Meryl Streep says Thatcher 'was a feminist'

Oscar-nominated actor says former British prime minister 'was a feminist, whether she likes it or not', as she picks up lifetime achievement award at the Berlin film festival
78 comments
Meryl Streep went one step beyond at the Baftas

We can't wait to see how the Iron Lady star will enliven Oscar night
25 comments
Argentinian critics pan Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady

The film, which shows Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands war, goes down badly on its release in Buenos Aires
The Iron Lady's private secretary brands Thatcher biopic inauthentic

Close aide Cynthia Crawford laments film's lack of realism and says portrayal of Thatcher's dementia is 'disproportionate' 21 comments
What a tragic wasted opportunity to present a true portrait of the Iron Lady

Stewart Lee: Phyllida Lloyd has really missed a trick with her film about Margaret Thatcher
458 comments
Bringing along Baby: The Iron Lady doesn't get the infant vote

Esther Walker: Baroness Thatcher's tale prompted an oddly persistent squalling from the benches. Her fellow mothers were far more intrigued 17 comments
Who knew? Scotland and Ireland love The Iron Lady

Charles Gant: Polarising Thatcher biopic stands up well in multiplexes against M:I 4 and Sherlock, but The Artist beats her at the arthouse
22 comments
What Borgen and The Iron Lady tell us about women in power

Both new Danish political drama Borgen and Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady show us there is still no clear map for women in politics
46 comments
Is The Iron Lady's heart of gold quite right?

David Cox: Phyllida Lloyd's Margaret Thatcher biopic has proved so infuriating to so many by insisting on the humanity of the Tories 230 comments
How Olivia Colman, star of Peep Show and The Iron Lady, made the big time

After sitcoms and serious drama, Olivia Colman is about to start West End rehearsals in a Noel Coward classic 45 comments
Margaret Thatcher: a feminist icon?

By focusing on gender and class, the biopic The Iron Lady paints Margaret Thatcher as a feminist icon. But was she? We asked a number of influential women
119 comments
Phyllida Lloyd: how to humanise Margaret Thatcher

Director Phyllida Lloyd proved, with Mamma Mia!, that there was a massive audience for female-led films. Now for the next challenge: helping Meryl Streep bring Thatcher to the screen in The Iron Lady. By Kira Cochrane 21 comments
Red carpet watch: Meryl Streep

Imogen Fox doesn't want to get the Margaret Thatcher look, but she'll never tire of Meryl Streep on the red carpet. Who are you looking forward to seeing as award season approaches?
10 comments
A Thatcher state funeral would be bound to lead to protests

Seumas Milne: The Tory prime minister wasn't a great leader. She was the most socially destructive British politician of our times
1283 comments
Culture flash: Margaret Thatcher

The Iron Lady and the arts were never the closest of bedfellows – she took her axe to them and they rebelled
6 comments
Thatcher family turned down Iron Lady screening invite

Director Phyllida Lloyd has revealed that Margaret Thatcher's family turned down an invitation to an early viewing of the biopic 59 comments
The Iron Lady premiere – in pictures

Gallery (12 pictures), London lays out the blue carpet for the premiere of The Iron Lady at the BFI Southbank
Meryl Streep is favourite to win Best Actress Oscar for role in The Iron Lady

Bookies have given the 62-year-old even odds to win her third Academy Award with her star turn as Margaret Thatcher
The Iron Lady portrays a very different Margaret Thatcher from the one I knew

Meryl Streep rescues the film from caricature, says Michael White, who met Thatcher many times as the Guardian's sketchwriter from 1977-84
Is The Iron Lady a whitewash?

Liz Hoggard and Peter Lilley debate the accuracy of Meryl Streep's film portrayal of Margaret Thatcher
255 comments
Oh Maggie

Poll, Guardian critic Xan Brooks writes that the biopic The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep, gives us 'Thatcher without Thatcherism' – glossing over what a controversial and divisive political figure she was. Did you admire the real Iron Lady?
97 comments
The Iron Lady was more than just a fabulous blowdry

Alex von Tunzelmann: Wishy-washy and unfocused, Phyllida Lloyd's Margaret Thatcher biopic fails to embody the indomitable spirit of its subject
42 comments
Meryl Streep develops admiration for Margaret Thatcher after starring role

Oscar-winner and Hollywood liberal says playing former PM in The Iron Lady has made her see the woman behind the politics
The Iron Lady returns to Commons – in possible debate over film's 'good taste'

Tory complaints over 'intrusive and unfair' nature of Oscar-tipped Margaret Thatcher biopic lead to calls for Commons debate 131 comments
Thatcher biographer says The Iron Lady is inaccurate

Biopic starring Meryl Streep has been criticised by John Campbell, who wrote the book on which the film is based
151 comments
Meryl Streep wins award for Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady

High hopes for Oscar as New York Critics Circle's best actress prize seen as first of many for the veteran film star
Will The Iron Lady make women want to dress like Margaret Thatcher?

Fashion editors love a 'strong woman', so we can expect a deluge of features on how to Get the Thatcher Look
136 comments
Where was the mention of Margaret Thatcher's victims?

Suzanne Moore: Meryl Streep, who plays Thatcher in The Iron Lady, invited me back for apple pie after a screening. But that didn't lessen my hatred for the former Tory leader
775 comments
Meryl Streep's Iron Lady dismantled by Norman Tebbit

Margaret Thatcher wasn't 'half-hysterical' leader film portrays, says former Tory MP – but reviewers rave regardless 128 comments
Thatcher role puts 'troublemaker from the valleys' on road to stardom

Alexandra Roach left Rada only last year but the young Welsh actress has had five big parts opposite Hollywood names 17 comments
The Iron Lady poster: weirder than Westminster?

Andrew Pulver: The film poster for the Margaret Thatcher biopic, starring Meryl Streep, is a freaky fusion of the former PM's head and the Houses of Parliament. What do you make of it?
68 comments
Shooting the Iron Lady

Ben Walters: Meryl Streep's Thatcher film – like so much new cinema – reduces politics to a personal journey.
175 comments
Does Meryl Streep shine as the Iron Lady?

Michael White: Streep has Margaret Thatcher's plummy tones down to a T, as the film trailer reveals – but what's with her sense of humour? 151 comments
The Iron Lady: World exclusive international teaser trailer - video

Video (1min 02sec), Meryl Streep stars as Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd's biopic, in cinemas early next year. What do you think of this first look at the film?
191 comments
Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher reveals a modern icon

Alison Jackson: Framing the debate: The photograph of Meryl Streep as Thatcher reminds us of the potent combination that created the image of an 'Iron Lady' 334 comments
How will Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher compare to past portrayals of the Iron Lady?

Ben Walters: From girlish flirt to monstrous sociopath, the former PM has been variously interpreted on screen
105 comments
Streeped in history – Maggie pic makes a splash

Media Monkey: Meryl Streep's reincarnation as Margaret Thatcher dominates front pages
Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher – what's not to like?

The new film The Iron Lady looks to capture the image of a woman capable of deploying sexual allure politically
Meryl Streep's Margaret Thatcher revealed in first still from The Iron Lady

Biopic about Britain's first female PM by Mamma Mia! director Phyllida Lloyd also stars Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher
359 comments
UK Film Council could have last laugh with £1m donation to Thatcher biopic

If reports that The Iron Lady is 'some left-wing fantasy' are true, then Conservatives may not welcome the UKFC's final move
135 comments

佘契爾夫人英國政壇獨領風騷【21:15】

〔中央社〕在英國和國際間深孚人望的英國前首相「鐵娘子」佘契爾夫人（Margaret Thatcher），今天早上中風發作辭世，享壽87歲，生前民調肯定她不但是英國第一位女首相，也是英國最偉大的首相。

以不輕易妥協的「鐵娘子」形象深植人心的佘契爾夫人，1979至1990年間擔任首相，主要政績包含，1982年帶領英國在福克蘭戰役中獲勝；與美國前總統雷根並肩合作，結束冷戰；以及加入歐洲聯盟但保持英國的自主性等。

1925年10月出生於英格蘭東部林肯郡商業小鎮格蘭森（Grantham）的佘契爾夫人，執政逾十年，是二十世紀英國任職最久的首相，也是英國歷來唯一擔任此要職的女性，在位期間領導保守派大刀闊斧變革。

1979年5月4日，佘契爾夫人提著她註冊商標的手提包，穿著第一套後來有如她制服的藍色套裝，入主唐寧街首相府，自那天起她以直截了當的言詞和鋼鐵般的強勢統御男性屬下，領導英國走向她想走的方向。

英國少有首相的姓名被拿來為主義命名，她是其中之一。所謂佘契爾主義主張的是個人、自由和終止階級之分，還有減少國家的控制，提倡民營企業，以及打破相信集體權力的一切事物，由工會以至前蘇聯集團。

英國民眾認為，佘契爾夫人遠離政壇多年後，影響力仍持續「發威」。當年她將國營事業私有化的政策，促使英國走向市場經濟，迫使工黨放棄老舊的社會主義，開創了英國經濟的全新局面。

佘契爾夫人上台後不久，就面臨在位期間最嚴厲的挑戰：1982年，阿根廷占領了英國在南大西洋的遙遠屬地福克蘭群島。

英國出兵奪回福克蘭群島，佘契爾夫人聲望飛升，保守黨隨後在1983年的大選擊敗工黨，接下來很快陸續對付礦工、工會和由左派控制的倫敦市議會。

在國際上，佘契爾夫人也迅速贏得超過她在國內獲得的推崇和尊敬，並與美國總統雷根建立緊密的聯盟關係，與前蘇聯進行冷戰對抗。

不過，佘契爾夫人最後栽在歐洲手裡。儘管她協助歐洲聯盟友邦在1987年成立單一市場，始終對歐洲有所疑慮，終於在保守黨內部引發「宮廷政變」，由梅傑取而代之繼任首相。

她雖以作風強悍的「鐵娘子」著稱，但跟隨她20年的貼身保鑣曾表示，佘契爾夫人曾為他擦拭鞋上的髒物，還整理過執勤保鑣的房間，令他「揪感心」。

退休保鑣史崔文斯（Barry Strevens），曾公開他陪伴佘契爾夫人不為人知的點滴，讓世人認識鐵娘子溫柔與體貼的一面。

史崔文斯說，1978年他被指派擔任當時在野的保守黨黨魁佘契爾夫人的保鑣，和佘契爾夫人相處數週後，就臣服於她對下屬的貼心與個人魅力，並轉而開始崇拜她。

2003年6月，佘契爾夫人的夫婿佘契爾爵士去世，享年88歲。兩人結縭逾50載。

佘契爾夫人因年歲增長健康狀況惡化，晚年曾發生過數次中風，2005年醫生建議她不宜再公開發表演講，後來健康持續惡化，罹患老人失智症，但她堅忍不拔的保守主義重塑了1980年代英國政壇風貌。

Ex-Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher dies, aged 87

Baroness Thatcher was the first woman to be UK prime minister, winning three elections

Baroness Thatcher 1925-2013

Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher has died "peacefully" at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke, her family has announced.

Successor David Cameron called her a "great Briton" and the Queen spoke of her sadness at the death.
Lady Thatcher was Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990. She was the first woman to hold the role.
She will not have a state funeral but will be accorded the same status as Princess Diana and the Queen Mother.
The ceremony, with full military honours, will take place at London's St Paul's Cathedral.
The union jack above Number 10 Downing Street has been lowered to half-mast.
'Force of nature' Mr Cameron, who is in Madrid for meetings, has cancelled planned talks in Paris with French President Francois Hollande and will return to the UK later on Monday.

“Start Quote

She didn't just lead our country; she saved our country”

David Cameron

Lady Thatcher's government privatised several state-owned industries. She was also in power when the UK went to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982.

Mr Cameron told the BBC: "Margaret Thatcher succeeded against all the odds. The real thing is she didn't just lead our country; she saved our country.
"I believe she will go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister."
A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: "The Queen was sad to hear the news of the death of Baroness Thatcher. Her Majesty will be sending a private message of sympathy to the family."
Lady Thatcher, born Margaret Roberts, served as MP for Finchley, north London, from 1959 to 1992.
Having been education secretary, she successfully challenged former prime minister Edward Heath for her party's leadership in 1975 and won general elections in 1979, 1983 and 1987.
Sir John Major, who replaced Lady Thatcher was prime minister in 1990, called her a "true force of nature".
'Respect' He added: "Her reforms of the economy, trades union law, and her recovery of the Falkland Islands elevated her above normal politics, and may not have been achieved under any other leader.
"Her outstanding characteristics will always be remembered by those who worked closely with her: courage and determination in politics, and humanity and generosity of spirit in private."
Labour leader Ed Miliband said Lady Thatcher had been a "unique figure" who "reshaped the politics of a whole generation".
He added: "The Labour Party disagreed with much of what she did and she will always remain a controversial figure. But we can disagree and also greatly respect her political achievements and her personal strength."
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg described Lady Thatcher as one of the "defining figures in modern British politics", adding: "She may have divided opinion during her time in politics but everyone will be united today in acknowledging the strength of her personality and the radicalism of her politics."
London Mayor Boris Johnson tweeted: "Very sad to hear of death of Baroness Thatcher. Her memory will live long after the world has forgotten the grey suits of today's politics."
UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage called Lady Thatcher a "great inspiration", adding: "Whether you loved her or hated her nobody could deny that she was a great patriot, who believed passionately in this country and her people. A towering figure in recent British and political history has passed from the stage. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family."
Lady Thatcher had suffered poor health for several years. Her husband Denis died in 2003.

The Woman Who Saved Britain

Female, Methodist, provincial and literal-minded, Margaret Thatcher was never part of the Establishment

By DANIEL HANNAN

All Britons remember where they were when Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990. It was our equivalent of the Kennedy assassination—events that, curiously enough, both fell on Nov. 22. No British politician in living memory had provoked such strong feelings. At Thatcher's funeral in April, 23 years after she left office and a decade after her last intervention in public life, the battles she had so enjoyed were re-enacted: Many threw flowers before her coffin, while a few, their faces twisted in unfeigned loathing, yelled abuse.

Margaret Thatcher

By Charles Moore
Knopf, 859 pages, $35

Enlarge Image

Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos

The funeral was a reminder of what conviction politics looks like. These days, our leaders consult their pollsters, weigh their words, fret about how they are coming across. Margaret Thatcher, as Charles Moore shows in the magisterial first volume of his authorized biography, had a healthy interest in public opinion, but she never lost sight of where she wanted to go. While others drifted with the current, she was like a shark swimming only forward: focused, patriotic, slightly humorless and needing remarkably little sleep.
These were, happily, just the attributes that the times demanded. It is hard to convey the sheer wretchedness of the nation she was elected to govern in May 1979. Since World War II, Britons had seen their empire vanish, their standing deteriorate, their credit expire. Successive governments had inflated away their debts, with a disastrous effect on competitiveness and productivity.
By the mid-1970s, the U.K. had reached its lowest point. These were the years of double-digit inflation, of power cuts, of shortages. There were constant strikes, and trade-union leaders were better known household names than elected ministers. A Conservative government—a government of which Thatcher was the despairing education minister—was reduced to passing laws regulating prices and incomes.
Mr. Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, captures the atmosphere of these years beautifully: the worsening trade figures, the collapse in industrial output, the IMF bailout. "Britain is a tragedy," Henry Kissinger told President Gerald Ford in 1975. "It has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing until North Sea oil comes in." An editorial in The Wall Street Journal in April of that year was more pointed: "Good-bye, Great Britain. It was nice knowing you."
Thatcher, almost alone, would not accept what was happening. "I can't bear Britain in decline, I just can't," she blurted shortly before she became prime minister. Nowadays, those words sound unremarkable—which is the ultimate tribute to what she achieved. For, at the time, the almost unanimous view of the Establishment was that the slide was irreversible and that the purpose of politics was to make it as painless as possible.
Born in Grantham in Lincolnshire in 1925, Margaret Thatcher was never part of the Establishment. Female, Methodist, provincial and literal-minded, she never acquired, nor wanted to acquire, the amused cynicism that was the hallmark of the educated Englishman. One of the reasons that she had such a deep affection for Americans was that she recognized in them the qualities that set her apart from most of her fellow MPs: enthusiasm, optimism, guilelessness, self-belief.
Where did it come from, her self-belief? We find it in her character from the beginning. When she won a school prize at the age of 9, her principal congratulated her on her luck. "I wasn't lucky, I deserved it," replied the young Margaret Roberts, who, with her tendency to simplify everything, genuinely couldn't understand what luck had to do with it. Her single-mindedness, her obsessive self-improvement, took her to Oxford, despite the resistance of her secondary-school headmistress, who thought she should attend the local university. That headmistress was the first of many who were to find themselves knocked aside by sheer force of personality: Trade-union leaders, Tory grandees, Eurocrats and Argentine strongmen were to experience the same thing.
Willpower is not unusual in politicians, of course. What is unusual is the marriage of ambition and ideology. Many elected representatives work extraordinary hours for reasons that have to do with personal psychology. Think of, say, Lyndon Johnson, whose drive came from the humiliation of watching his family going bankrupt when he was 13. Every day that I spend in politics convinces me of the truth of P.J. O'Rourke's observation that many candidates are running for office, as he imagines one of them admitting, "in order to even the score with those grade-school classmates of mine who, thirty-five years ago, gave me the nickname Fish Face."
Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, was animated by ideas—ideas from which she never deviated. Her father, Alf Roberts, a shopkeeper and popular Methodist preacher, was a local councilor whose main preoccupation was to reduce the burden of taxes and regulations on the shopkeeping class. A model of conservative decency, he would send his daughters with loaves of bread to the families he knew to be needy, carefully telling them that he had baked too much, so that the pride of the recipients should not be hurt. He was not perfect: There are tantalizing hints in Mr. Moore's narrative that he may have been something of a ladies' man. Still, in his mind, thrift, sobriety and industry were not abstract Protestant virtues but active political principles.
Thatcherism was, in many ways, just a refinement of those core beliefs. Thatcher herself was no intellectual, though she diligently read up on the works of the great thinkers who ennobled her prejudices, including Frédéric Bastiat, Edmund Burke, Joseph Schumpeter, Alexis de Tocqueville, C.S. Lewis and, in particular, F.A. Hayek, whose "Constitution of Liberty" she used to pull from her handbag, declaring: "This is what we believe." Still, Hayek can be heavy going, and she was more comfortable with the homespun patriotic conservatism of Rudyard Kipling, whose poetry she had recited aloud as a girl in competitions. (Her accent, which detractors took as evidence of social climbing, was, Mr. Moore shows, the product of teenage elocution lessons.)
What surprised me most in reading this biography was the extent to which Thatcher's politics were informed by her Christianity. Without ever renouncing the Methodism of her girlhood, she drifted into attending Church of England services punctiliously and quietly. British politicians, unlike their American counterparts, almost never mention God. This is partly because our electorate is less churchgoing than yours and partly because even the most devout Britons are uncomfortable discussing religion. Thatcher occasionally broke this rule, horrifying the leaders of the Church of Scotland in 1988, for instance, when she told them that the Good Samaritan wouldn't have been of much use if he hadn't had money to help the injured traveler.
Yet so successful has been the caricature of Thatcher as a mechanical free-marketeer who thought only of economics that even her supporters have lost sight of the extent to which her doctrines had a moral base. As Mr. Moore notes, her father,
had believed in what Gladstone called "effort, honest manful effort," and it was a combination of Gladstonian economic views of retrenchment and reform with Methodism which animated Mrs. Thatcher. Denis Thatcher shared this analysis of her attitudes. He believed that some of what people thought of as his wife's "right-wingery" actually came from her religious upbringing: "She can't find a sustainable argument that people should be paid for not doing any work."
Like all successful leaders, she used speechwriters who could express her instincts in suitably elevated language. In New York in 1975, she brilliantly described the then-prevalent egalitarianism as "an undistinguished combination of envy and what might be called 'bourgeois guilt.' " But her natural language was blunter. "Why does he keep talking about the boojwah?" she once asked of a sympathetic journalist. "Why not find a good plain English word for the good plain English people? The boojwah live in France."
Like her close ally Ronald Reagan, Thatcher was often attacked for her failure to grasp nuance. After listening to a talk by the distinguished historian Edward Norman, rightly predicting, as Mr. Moore writes, "that the issue of nuclear weapons, which had fallen comparatively quiet since the early 1960s, would soon reappear as a great moral struggle in the West," she declaimed above the hubbub: "I agree with Doctor Norman: we must defend Christian values with the ATOM BOMB."
Yet, as Mr. Moore shows, uncompromising beliefs could go hand in hand with tactical flexibility. The Pentagon, perhaps surprisingly, was reluctant to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe in the early 1980s, regarding them as an unnecessary expense when the U.S. already had a massive arsenal. Those Americans who favored the deployment, above all Reagan's first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, knew that the best way to convince the doubtful president would be through Thatcher. We then see her in these pages playing the unlikely role of a bridge-builder between the U.S. and Europe, securing American concessions on the sanctions Reagan had imposed on the U.S.S.R.—sanctions that disproportionately hurt Western European companies—in exchange for agreement to deploy the missiles in Great Britain, West Germany and Italy. Thank heaven she did: That deployment set in motion the events that were to lead to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War.
This biography gives us plenty of new material on Thatcher's relationship with Reagan, who privately called her "the only European leader I know with balls." The Gipper chivalrously allowed her to browbeat him, first over the missiles and later over American attempts to mediate during the Falklands War. She was right on this latter occasion, too: The State Department feared that the humiliation of Gen. Galtieri's junta would lead to communism in Argentina. In fact, it led to democracy.
Mr. Moore also reveals, extraordinarily, that the prime minister was in contact with the Irish Republican Army during the hunger strikes by prisoners in the early 1980s. She always denied this fact, even to herself, hiding behind a piece of casuistry: The contact was through an intelligence officer and was therefore necessarily unofficial. Thatcher had sought, reasonably enough, to find a formula that might save the hunger strikers' lives without compromising the principle that democratic governments don't deal with paramilitary organizations. Nonetheless, had the facts emerged at the time, her reputation would have suffered gravely and, to the end of her days, she could not bring herself to admit that she had had dealings with terrorists.
Such revelations are characteristic of Mr. Moore's penetrating and honest work. Broadly supportive of the Thatcher project, he is nonetheless careful never to let his politics color his story. Though this is, oddly, his first book, he is arguably the outstanding British journalist of his generation, one whose Tory sympathies go hand in hand with a determination to write from first principles, disregarding conventional wisdom. This biography was written on the understanding that its subject would never see it, which gave the author a freedom that he might not have enjoyed had he felt her presence over his shoulder. For example, Thatcher never admitted to having any boyfriends before Denis, but Mr. Moore unearths four, including one Scottish farmer whom she liked but never fancied and so, briskly, paired off with her sister, Muriel, who was happily married to him ever after.
Mr. Moore combines great narrative sweep with telling details. Following a false report of the sinking of a Royal Navy vessel during the Falklands campaign, Denis found his wife sitting on the end of the bed in tears: "Oh no, oh no, another ship! All my young men!" Denis, who had served in Italy during World War II, quietly took her hand. "That's what war's like, love." His military record made her depend even more heavily than usual on his advice during that campaign, and he emerges as a hero from these pages.
Thatcher, who published her memoirs in two volumes in 1993 and 1995, treated the 1979 election as the obvious dividing point. Mr. Moore found that this would place too much material in the second volume of the biography and so carried the first up to the moment of victory in the Falklands in 1983. He ends with a celebratory dinner at No. 10 Downing Street that, he says, "may well have been the happiest moment of her life."
It was a happy moment for the entire country. The military triumph put the seal on an economic transformation that had already begun. Having been outperformed by every Western European state during the 1960s and 1970s, Britain outgrew them all in the 1980s (except Spain, which was bouncing back from an even lower place). Thatcher's faith in her countrymen was amply vindicated. She emerges from this book more subtle, more layered than either her supporters or her opponents tend to believe. But the single-mindedness for which she is most remembered was real.
Stubbornness in itself, however, is no virtue. Thatcher's achievement lay in having got the big calls right: She saw that there could be no compromise with the prevalent social-democratic consensus, or with the trade-union militants, or with the Soviet Union, or with Gen. Galtieri. Though she showed more subtlety and suppleness on all these matters than most realized at the time, she knew that her opponents would have to be defeated. And so, in the end, they were.
That, ultimately, is what the left can't forgive. She took a country that they had made bankrupt, dishonored and demoralized and left it prosperous, confident and free. She did it all without ever losing an election to them. She ended up transforming, not just her party, but the Labour opposition, too, which had to accept her economic settlement to become electable. That, perhaps, was what pleased her most of all.
—Mr. Hannan is a British Conservative member of the European Parliament.

A version of this article appeared May 18, 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Woman Who Saved Britain.

人和書 ( Men and Books)

2013年5月20日星期一

Margaret Thatcher( 1925-2013), 鐵娘子, The Downing Street Years / Margaret ThatcherBy Charles Moore

The Downing Street Years

The Iron Lady