Margaret Thatcher was a towering figure of the late twentieth century. A generation after her fall from power, she remains an extraordinarily divisive figure. For some, she freed the individual to rise up and prosper without shame. For others, she worshiped greed and with callous zeal destroyed traditional working-class communities. But no one doubts the impression she made on the tone and texture of British politics and her significance as an international actor in the closing stages of the Cold War.

As a female leader of a great power in the democratic age, she was a path-breaker. In her cultivated style she was something like her nation’s no-nonsense maiden aunt: strict but concerned; realistic but nostalgic; dismissive of airy notions but possessed of a highly acute intelligence; practical but fiercely committed to ideals.

The greater claims that will be made for her, that she defeated trade union power and consigned socialism to the dustbin of history, are overstated. The social and economic consequences of deindustrialization that transformed Britain in the 1980s were set in motion before she was Prime Minister and would have taken place in one form or other without her, as they did in other advanced countries whether under conservative, liberal, or social-democratic administration. But only in Britain could the rise of neoliberalism and property-owning democracy be seen as a kind of return to the country’s most glorious age — the Victorian era, when Britannia ruled the world’s waves and commerce.