Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher was the British prime minister from 1979 to 1990. Her governments pursued privatisation, reduced trade-union power, confronted inflation and unemployment, won the Falklands War and reshaped Britain’s political economy.

Margaret Thatcher also held the offices or ranks of baron, Leader of the Opposition, President-in-Office of the European Council, and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Margaret Thatcher was born in Grantham and died in The Ritz London.

Jeffrey Archer’s This Was a Man brings Margaret Thatcher into Emma Clifton’s later public life when the prime minister invites her to take on a national role, placing a fictional family saga inside the politics of the 1980s. M. J. Carter’s Anthony Blunt reaches Thatcher through the 1979 parliamentary disclosure that exposed Blunt’s Soviet espionage and ended the secrecy surrounding his immunity. Max Hastings’ The Battle for the Falklands examines Thatcher as the British political leader whose decisions shaped the response to Argentina’s 1982 invasion. Peter Ackroyd’s Innovation sets her premiership within the late-twentieth-century remaking of British politics and society, while James Vernon’s Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present places Thatcherism within the longer history of industrialisation, empire, welfare, decolonisation and market reform.