Volume 43, Number 5 · March 21, 1996
Mrs. Thatcher's Revenge
By Ian Buruma
The Path to Power
by Margaret Thatcher
HarperCollins, 650 pp., $30.00
Letters from London
by Julian Barnes
Vintage, 320 pp., $13.00 (paper)
The Disenchanted Isle: Mrs. Thatcher's Capitalist Revolution
by Charles Dellheim
Norton, 416 pp., $25.00
There is a mansion near Columbus, Ohio. It is very grand indeed. Horses in the fields, wrought-iron gates, a neo-Georgian style of architecture, a ballroom inside, and a hall as big as a movie theater. In that hall, on the occasion I had to see it, was an elegant side table, and on that table, picked out by a hidden spotlight, was a book, heavy as a Bible: the first volume of Lady Thatcher's memoirs, The Downing Street Years. The Baroness of Finchley, I was told, had dined at the house only a week before. Snobbish thoughts came instantly to mind (as they are wont to do when reflecting on the baroness). She had come a long way, I thought, from a corner shop in Grantham, Lincolnshire, to the baronial splendor of a mansion in Columbus. Then again, I thought, no less snobbishly, the lord of the manor was probably just her kind of guy, her ideal baron, so to speak: very rich, very selfmade, American, and Jewish.
Review, 5838 words
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