Thatcher and the BBC

The new issue of BBC History magazine is out today, a fact which I only mention because it includes my review of Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher. It's a bit late, of course, but that's because the book was published so opportunistically as soon as she drew her last breath - magazines have longer lead-in times and can't respond with such indecent haste.

The review isn't available online, but in broad terms: I didn't concur with the other reviews that I've seen. I don't think it's a definitive account of her life and works up to the Falklands War (where this volume stops). I still rate Hugo Young's One of Us as the best account.

One thing I wanted to mention, but didn't have space in the review is the convention of adding a biographical footnote to everyone when they make their first appearance. This is a tendency that can be bathetically entertaining - I still cherish, for example, the reference in Joe Orton's diaries to Joseph Goebbels, where the editor John Lahr added a note to tell us that the Nazi propaganda minister got a PhD from Heidelberg University.

What irritated me in the Thatcher biography is a variation on the same theme: a scrupulous insistence on recording what school everyone went to. Does it really matter that much? Maybe it does to Charles Moore (Eton; Trinity College, Cambridge), but amongst grown-ups I rather feel that there comes a time to put away childish things and to be defined by something a bit more substantial.