Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized ­Biography, Volume Three: Herself Alone
CHARLES MOORE
(ALLEN LANE, 1072 PP, £35)
Tablet bookshop price £31.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

A history of then; the story of now. Charles Moore’s thundering biography of Margaret Thatcher reaches its climax with a meticulous explanation, swathed in all the drama of her fall, of the forces that have brought her party close to a fatal schism. Thirty years have passed since many of these events, yet they crackle with contemporary fire, because today’s chaos has a past.

Moore’s history of that time gets much of its power in this third volume from the obvious fact that the biographer is part of the story – sharing the anger of her intimates who saw power slipping away, feeling their growing belief that the EU was becoming an alien force, identifying her opponents as dark plotters, always scheming their schemes. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, his own well-known convictions do nothing to detract from his achievement. Instead, they propel the story to its end with exhilarating force.

Since he has written a biography on a Wagnerian scale, giving vivid depth to a landscape peopled with two generations of politicians and their hangers-on, it is right that he should let himself go in the approach to Götterdämmerung. Nothing else would really do.