Not another book on Margaret Thatcher. The heart sinks. Apart from a dozen biographies, ranging from Hugo Young’s magisterial One of Us to the frankly awful Margaret, daughter of Beatrice by Leo Abse, plus shrewd glimpses from her daughter Carol in Below the Parapet, the lady is in print herself. Her career statements, running to fourteen million words, are now available for the brave or besotted on CD-ROM from OUP. Is there room for more? The answer is yes.

John Campbell’s Edward Heath won the NCR Award in 1994. This is the first of two volumes on Thatcher. Poor man, he appears to have absorbed everything the loquacious lady said or wrote, and much of what she inspired others to report (the snippets from diarists as diverse as Peter