Around the time she came to power, one of Margaret Thatcher’s close aides described her to me as “the reality principle in skirts.” It is an image that evokes a different age. In 1979, there were no computers in Downing Street. Telephone calls were routed through a switchboard, and no one could make a call from his desk. Rolls Royce and Jaguar were state-owned companies; electricity, gas, and water were public utilities; government had a majority stake in British Petroleum; British Airways was a nationalized industry. But by the time Thatcher was ousted in an inner-party coup in 1990, all those enterprises and more were in private hands. The transformation that occurred during the Thatcher years has been seen as the work of her powerful will, and in some ways so it was. Yet it was also a continuation of powerful trends: British manufacturing had been shrinking for much of the century—a process that advancing globalization would only increase. By breaking with the policies of the past, Thatcher in fact accelerated changes in the economy that were already underway.

But economic policy was not for Thatcher the final end of politics. As she put it in an interview in 1981, “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.” She succeeded in her object, though not in the way she wanted. With the exception of the monarchy, no British institution has the authority that most British institutions possessed when she became prime minister. The hierarchical and deferential Tory Party that Thatcher inherited has been replaced by a faction-ridden shell in which no leader is safe, while Scotland is pondering independence and the future of the Union is in doubt. The bourgeois life of the 1950s— an idealized image of which she aimed to re-create: a middle-class world of secure livelihoods, dutiful families, and prudent saving for the future—has vanished without trace, along with the working-class communities that underpinned British industry. Dreaming of restoring a country that she believed was in danger of being lost, Thatcher brought into being one she could not have conceived. Britain became less collectivist and more entrepreneurial in spirit, while at the same time the middle-class life to which she was so devoted withered away.

Covering the time from Thatcher's birth up to her role in the Falklands war in 1982, Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands is one of two projected volumes; but this is already a major study of a pivotal leader—indeed, it is already one of the greatest biographies in the English language. A former newspaper editor and Conservative insider but “never part of her ‘gang,'" Charles Moore brings a detached and inquiring perspective to Thatcher’s life that she never thought of adopting herself. He begins by noting that Thatcher had little taste for introspection: “At his trial, Socrates famously said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. He had not, of course, met Margaret Thatcher.” The Socratic maxim is, of course, a philosopher’s conceit. Thatcher was able to do what she did because she did not waste energy in self-analysis. The Falklands War, for example, was a tremendous gamble, which she took in the clear knowledge that it could be the end of her as a politician. She was aware of the hubris that might flow from being the first female war leader with executive power in British history since Elizabeth I—but even so, as Moore notes, “she was always very cautious about analysing herself, even in private.” Writing Thatcher’s life, Moore tells us, the biographer “finds himself examining a life unexamined by the person who lived it.”

A profound study of Thatcher as a human being and not just as a politician, Moore’s book contains a number of revelations about her personal life, including the early romantic attachments that she formed and broke off before meeting her husband, Denis. Their partnership was not always easy. In the autumn of 1964, Moore reports, Denis suffered “a nervous breakdown,” in the course of which he left for two months in South Africa and “may even have contemplated divorce.” Denis always denied that the crisis had anything to do with his wife’s absorption in her political career, but her daughter, Carol, reports that there were friends who believed that he felt isolated. Yet without her husband—who, while being more politically extreme, was also a more equable character—Thatcher would have been lost. Her declining years seem to have been much sadder after his death.

In one of many arresting vignettes, Moore recounts how, in an afternoon walk from school just before Christmas in 1942, the young Margaret Roberts explained to a friend why she couldn’t believe in angels: “I have worked out scientifically that in order to fly, an angel would need a six-foot long breastbone to bear the weight of its wings.” Born in 1925, Thatcher seems always to have remained a religious believer; but the manner in which Britain’s future prime minister approached this particular aspect of Christian belief displayed the methodical turn of mind that she brought to every aspect of her life and her career.