Margaret Thatcher
  • Published: 2 December 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241687673
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 1024
  • RRP: $110.00
Categories:

Margaret Thatcher

The Authorized Biography: Single-volume Centenary Edition

Formats & editions
Hardback
2 Dec 2025
EBook
18 Sep 2025
Pre-order from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond Book Hero Unity Books University Book Shop Find Local Retailers

Charles Moore's bestselling and definitive biography of Britain's first female Prime Minister, now in a single volume

With unparalleled authority and dramatic detail, Charles Moore's definitive biography of Margaret Thatcher, now published in a single volume to mark the centenary of her birth, presents the whole history of the woman who transformed Britain and the world.

With unique access to Thatcher’s private and governmental papers and extensive interviews with her, her family, and colleagues, Moore gives readers an unsurpassed portrait of her early years, her rise to power and her revolutionary eleven and a half years as Prime Minister. He guides us through her economic battles to her zenith at the Falklands crisis, her extraordinary three election victories and her dramatic final days in office.

Moore describes her sometimes combative relationships with senior colleagues – especially Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and Michael Heseltine - who contributed both to her rise and to her fall. He portrays the strength and importance of her relationship with Queen Elizabeth II, while offering a candid account of their difficulties. He also brilliantly conveys Thatcher’s pivotal role on the world stage – including in the ending of the Cold War, the fierce battle over the future of Europe, and her relationships with Reagan, Gorbachev, Bush, Kohl and Mandela. He shows how she was a pioneer – of privatization, which has since been copied all over the world, and as the first leader of a major state to understand climate change. He explains how ‘Thatcherism’ became a set of ideas both welcomed and contested across the world.

Throughout, Moore illuminates the complexities of Thatcher’s character – her determination, boldness and the challenges she faced as a woman in a male-dominated political world - but is by no means uncritical. He shows what was remarkable about her and what was infuriating, her extraordinary strengths and sometimes surprising vulnerability.

This edition combines the insights of the original three volumes, providing a comprehensive portrait of one of the most influential figures of her age, whose life reminds us today of the power of great leadership.
  • Published: 2 December 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241687673
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 1024
  • RRP: $110.00
Categories:

Also by Charles Moore

Margaret Thatcher
UFO Crash at Roswell
See all

Praise for Margaret Thatcher

Moore's great gift is his ability to make Thatcher's story fresh again, and above all to remind us of how odd she was ... The thoroughness of the research, the hundreds of interviews, and above all the access to her family and friends, enabled [him] to produce a multifaceted picture of a compelling life ... Although this is very much a narrative biography, it is also a book about ideas: where they come from, how they affect people and how they get shaped into policies ... one of the definitive books about Britain in the late twentieth century

Anne Applebaum, Daily Telegraph

Moore has produced a biography so masterly - so packed with fascinating detail, with such a strong narrative drive, propelled by a central character who is at the same time both very bizarre and very conventional - that it comes as close as biography can come to being a work of art ... One of the many strengths of his book is that it never loses sight of just how unusual she was, in terms of both her personal psychology and her place in public life ... This book is a triumph of diligence [and] of narrative art and human understanding, at its centre a peculiar force of nature, never to be repeated

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

One of the great biographical achievements of our times

Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

Moore's project is a study of detailed depth, and fine and transparent judgements, which rises to the largeness of a figure and a time that were of world significance

John Lloyd, Financial Times

One of the most thrilling, comprehensive, fair-minded and elegantly written biographies of modern times. It is full of complex argument, and a very large cast, but it is a joy to read

Andrew Marr, New Statesman

Reviewers are supposed never to use the word "definitive" about a history book or biography, but with Charles Moore's life of Margaret Thatcher, one has no other option. ... an absolute masterpiece of the biographer's art

Andrew Roberts, Daily Telegraph

This is a magnificent political biography which takes its place next to Robert Blake's Disraeli and Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson on the highest level ... extraordinarily compelling

Philip Hensher, Spectator