The Magazine

Rebel With a Cause

Margaret Thatcher, revolutionary.

Jul 13, 2009, Vol. 14, No. 40 • By JOHN O'SULLIVAN
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There Is No Alternative

Why Margaret Thatcher Matters

by Claire Berlinski

Basic Books, 400 pp., $27.95

Ronald Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher

A Political Marriage

by Nicholas Wapshott

Sentinel, 352 pp., $25.95

A Swim-on Part
in the Goldfish Bowl

A Memoir

by Carol Thatcher

Headline Review, 320 pp., £18.99

Thatcher's Britain

The Politics and Social Upheaval
of the Thatcher Era

by Richard Vinen

Simon & Schuster, 416 pp., £20

Margaret Thatcher

Grocer's Daughter to Iron Lady

by John Campbell

Vintage, 576 pp., £11.99

The Complete Public Statements of Margaret Thatcher 1945-1990

edited by Christopher Collins

Oxford, CD-ROM, £50

Where does the reputation of Margaret Thatcher stand 30 years after she entered Downing Street? Does it matter? And if so, why? These questions invite a complicated answer. The market in reputations is even more volatile than the market in corporations. It has a heavy bias towards short selling. And in the last year fluctuations in the financial market have stimulated equally dizzying zig-zags in blue-chip guru stocks--Alan Greenspan, Gordon Brown, Robert Rubin, almost any banker you care to name.

Until the middle of last year, Lady Thatcher's stock had been slowly on the rise. Her reputation had long been high outside Britain, especially so in the United States and Asia, but in recent years it had begun to climb in her native land as well.

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