Margaret Thatcher eclipses Churchill in Dictionary of National Biography
New biography added to authoritative reference work gives the UK’s first female prime minister more space than anybody but Shakespeare and Elizabeth I
Margaret Thatcher
has been added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
commanding more space in the venerable reference work than any other
Briton apart from Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. Eclipsing records for
Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill and Henry VIII, historian David
Cannadine’s biography of Britain’s first female PM is the third longest
of the 60,000-plus entries in the 72m-word work.
Thatcher’s listing details her rise to power, from Lincolnshire grocer’s daughter to global political force during the cold war. Cannadine is robust in his 30,000-word assessment of Thatcher’s career, noting that as well as being one of the few politicians to lend their name to a political doctrine – Thatcherism – her blunt approach to leadership led to ferocious clashes from the miners’ strike to the poll tax riots. Her front and backbenchers in parliament knew a leader who it was punishing to cross.
Cannadine, who is the ODNB’s general editor, concludes his assessment: “There are times when nations may need rough treatment. For good and for ill, Thatcher gave Britain plenty of it.”
As with the other 214 lives recorded in the latest additions to the ODNB, Thatcher died in 2013. Entries are always posthumous and feature persons of note from Roman Britain to the 21st century. Editors wait four years after the death of a notable figure to assess whether they are worthy of a place in what is effectively the canon of British public life, whose first edition was in 1885.
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Thatcher’s listing details her rise to power, from Lincolnshire grocer’s daughter to global political force during the cold war. Cannadine is robust in his 30,000-word assessment of Thatcher’s career, noting that as well as being one of the few politicians to lend their name to a political doctrine – Thatcherism – her blunt approach to leadership led to ferocious clashes from the miners’ strike to the poll tax riots. Her front and backbenchers in parliament knew a leader who it was punishing to cross.
Cannadine, who is the ODNB’s general editor, concludes his assessment: “There are times when nations may need rough treatment. For good and for ill, Thatcher gave Britain plenty of it.”
As with the other 214 lives recorded in the latest additions to the ODNB, Thatcher died in 2013. Entries are always posthumous and feature persons of note from Roman Britain to the 21st century. Editors wait four years after the death of a notable figure to assess whether they are worthy of a place in what is effectively the canon of British public life, whose first edition was in 1885.
-go to links
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