JOHN CAMPBELL CONCLUDES his monumental biography of twentieth-century Britain’s greatest peacetime prime minister with the Latin tag: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Margaret Thatcher’s eleven and a half years in government shaped today’s Britain, in the same way that life for the preceding generation was defined by decisions taken in the mid-l 940s. Campbell seeks to enable us to assess her long-term legacy. Given the irrational feelings Margaret Thatcher still arouses (only recently would the BBC screen a Falklands War drama that depicts her responding to news of casualties with anguish), it will probably not lead many to revise their own assessments; but it ought to.

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