Volume 35, Number 16 · October 27, 1988
The New England
By Ronald Dworkin
Mrs. Thatcher's Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era
by Peter Jenkins
Harvard University Press, 417 pp., $25.00
Peter Jenkins, the leading political journalist in Britain, has written a long and excellent book about the last two decades of British political history, a book that combines reporting and scholarship, journalism and history.[1] He retells the headline stories of the Thatcher years with a novelist's sense of detail and taste for gossip and a perceptive social theorist's mastery of complexity. He is privy to politicians' leaks and off-the-record complaints. He has included virtually every event of political importance since 1979. He describes, for example, the scandal in early 1986 over the government's leaks of information compromising a cabinet member which Thatcher thought might end her leadership within a day, as well as her politically dangerous decision to help President Reagan bomb Libya, even though she thought that action stupid.
Review, 4265 words
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