Margaret Thatcher: At Her Zenith: In London, Washington and Moscow [Paperback]

One of the masterpieces of British political history” (The New York Times) boasts unprecedented access to Thatcher colleagues, friends, family, and all her government and private papers, and offers a groudbreaking and essential portrait of a titanic figure, with all her capabilities and flaw, during the years of her greatest power.

In June 1983 Margaret Thatcher won the biggest increase in a government’s parliamentary majority in British electoral history and proceeded to transform relations with Europe, prioritize British industry, and reinvigorate the economy. For the only time since Churchill, Britain had a central place in dealings between the superpowers.

But even at her zenith, Thatcher was best by difficulties. She regularly faced calls for resignation, grew isolated in her own government, butted heads with the Queen, bullied her senior colleagues, and was deceived by her closest ally, Ronald Reagan, during the U.S. invasion of Grenada. 

Thatcher storms from these pages as from no other book.“[A] remarkable achievement….[Moore] writes clearly and honestly, never letting his essentially positive view of Thatcher get in the way of his ‘public interest’ duty to present us with the evidence as he finds it….His mastery of the vast range of topics with which Thatcher herself had to grapple is absolute, his marshaling of evidence adroit, and his judgments deliberate and fair. Moore remains on target to produce the definitive ‘case for the defense’ of this titanic and still controversial figure. His work will very likely stand alongside that of John Morley, official biographer of Gladstone, as one of the masterpieces of British political history.” —Richard Aldous, The New York Times