Charles Moore

margaret-thatcher

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The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not For Turning

Margaret Thatcher

The Authorized Biography, Volume Two: Everything She Wants

Moore has finally completed one of the most thrilling, comprehensive, fair-minded and elegantly written biographies of modern times. It is full of complex argument, and a very large cast, but it is a joy to read.

Reviewers are supposed never to use the word "definitive" about a history book or biograph, but with Charles Moore's life of Margaret Thatcher, of which this is the triumphant last volume, one has no other option. ... an absolute masterpiece of the biographer's art.

Moore's Margaret Thatcher is one of the truly great biographies. Throughout the three volumes it has been comprehensive and subtle, breaking new ground while being surefooted on familiar terrain. He provides a portrait of Thatcher - her anxiousness and her certainty, her strength and her frailty - that is surprising and fresh while still convincing. This volume completes a historical masterpiece.

Not merely the authorized biography, Moore's is the definitive biography of Thatcher, and perhaps one of the definitive books about Britain in the late twentieth century.

This is a magnificent political biography which takes its place next to Robert Blake's Disraeli and Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson on the highest level. Outstanding... superb... extraordinarily compelling.

Praise for the first two volumes

As close as biography can come to being a work of art

One of the great biographical achievements of our times

The Authorized Biography, Volume Three: Herself Alone

Shortlisted for the 2020 ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 
 
The final part of Charles Moore's bestselling and definitive biography of Britain's first female Prime Minister, 'One of the great biographical achievements of our times' (Sunday Times) 
 
A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, SPECTATOR, TELEGRAPH, IRISH TIMES, NEW STATESMAN AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
How did Margaret Thatcher change and divide Britain? How did her model of combative female leadership help shape the way we live now? How did the woman who won the Cold War and three general elections in succession find herself pushed out by her own MPs? 
Charles Moore's full account, based on unique access to Margaret Thatcher herself, her papers and her closest associates, tells the story of her last period in office, her combative retirement and the controversy that surrounded her even in death. It includes the Fall of the Berlin Wall which she had fought for and the rise of the modern EU which she feared. It lays bare her growing quarrels with colleagues and reveals the truth about her political assassination. 
 
Moore's three-part biography of Britain's most important peacetime prime minister paints an intimate political and personal portrait of the victories and defeats, the iron will but surprising vulnerability of the woman who dominated in an age of male power. This is the full, enthralling story.

Charles Moore joined the staff of the Daily Telegraph in 1979, and as a political columnist in the 1980s covered several years of Mrs Thatcher's first and second governments. He was Editor of the Spectator 1984-1990; Editor of the Sunday Telegraph 1992-1995; and Editor of the Daily Telegraph 1995-2003, for which he is still a regular columnist. The first volume of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, published in 2013, won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, the H.W. Fisher Best First Biography Prize and Political Book of the Year at the Paddy Power Political Book Awards.

This third and climactic volume of Charles Moore's authorised biography gives the definitive account of Margaret Thatcher's third term in office and her life after it. Three stories run through the whole book. The first is Mrs Thatcher's dominance of her government in almost every domestic field, but also her growing intolerance of dissent, the increasing alienation of her most senior ministers over Europe and the fatal corrosion which followed. The second is her commanding presence on the world stage (including relations with Reagan, Gorbachev, Bush, Kohl and Mandela), her role in the ending of the Cold War, her central position in the response to the invasion of Kuwait, and her increasing isolation as America's priorities in Europe changed. The third is how she, a woman, coped and led in political worlds almost entirely occupied by men. The three stories come dramatically together in the autumn of 1990 when, at the moment of greatest domestic danger, she travelled to Paris to participate in the ceremonies ending the Cold War. The chapters here on her fall are, in their drama, unmatched in modern political biography. 
 
Because Moore has interviewed all the major participants, who have spoken with candour, and has had access to all her papers, he is able to take us behind the scenes in these events and to give the feeling that we are in the room watching and listening as they unfold. (This includes, for the first time, a riveting account of the conflicts at her court.) Throughout, we see Mrs Thatcher's astonishing capacity to articulate her principles in the clearest possible terms and to fashion policy from them. The strength of her opposition to apartheid and her prescience on environmental issues are just two of the areas on which the book rewrites the standard accounts. In her combative retirement - an iconic figure to some and anathema to others - she continued to influence events in Britain profoundly; Moore shows the degree to which, during her third term and after, she directly shaped the path to our divided present. His account of her final years, with a few loyal supporters and the light dying, is beautifully judged. 
 
In October 1990, as this book comes to a climax, Mrs Thatcher entertained President Mitterrand of France to lunch at the British Embassy in Rome. The young Frenchwoman who took notes for Mitterrand, not an obvious Thatcherite, wrote afterwards, 'She had energy, charm and vision - especially energy - to an extent I had never seen before and never saw since in anyone else. I would have thrown myself into the Tiber for her.' This book and its predecessors show more clearly than ever before how the energy, charm and vision of Margaret Thatcher changed Britain and the world. 
 
Moore's three-part biography of Britain's most important peacetime prime minister paints an intimate political and personal portrait of the victories and defeats, the iron will but surprising vulnerability of the woman who dominated in an age of male power. This is the full, enthralling story.

Margaret Thatcher

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