A week on, and millions of words having been devoted to the subject, is there anything left unsaid about the late Margaret Thatcher? More pertinently to me right now, is there anything else I want to say about her, given that I've written well over 100,000 words about her and her influence?
Well, here's one thought that I haven't seen expressed. She was born in 1925. That puts her smack in the middle of the Angry Young Men generation of the 1950s. Kingsley Amis and John Braine were born in 1922, Alan Sillitoe in 1928 and John Osborne in 1929.
The archetypal Angry Young Man in fiction is a lower-middle class, provincial, grammar-school educated, Oxbridge graduate who marries above his social station and rails against the establishment and the old boy network. Which sounds familiar, somehow.
In 1977 Kingsley Amis had dinner with Thatcher and wrote to Philip Larkin about his impressions of her: 'I thought her bright and tough and nice, and by God she doesn't half hate lefties. All in all a tonic.'
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Most of the 'angry young men' of the 50s were rightist reactionaries by the late 70s, fulminating against anything even vaguely progressive in politics or the arts.
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