It is difficult to review half a life: knowing how the story ends, the main interest is how the biographer is going to treat it, what conclusions he will eventually come to, and to what extent he is preparing the ground in his treatment of the subject and those around her.
This first volume of the authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher brings the story to 1982 and triumph in the Falklands – the defining moment of her political career.
It is biography on the industrial scale; with free access to civil servants, hundreds of interviews, tens of thousands of files and documents and a huge reading list. There is at times almost too much information, but despite being an official biographer and a known admirer, Moore presents the evidence both for and against with scrupulous fairness.
He presents Thatcher as not having an intellectually orderly mind, or an original one. Rather than developing ideas on her own she was a sort of "stage-door Johnny" for the ideas of others, prone to captivation by a succession of economic and political gurus.
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