A NOTE ON STYLE AND SOURCES

Thanks to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation—to whom every scholar of Thatcher is indebted—much of the archival material to which I refer in this book is now online. Many of the speeches and interviews I describe are on YouTube. Where possible, I have tried to guide the reader to original documents, video clips, audio files, and photographs on the Internet. On my Web site, www.berlinski.com, you may listen to samples of my interviews with Thatcher’s friends and enemies. I encourage the reader to think of this as a multimedia book and to treat my notes as hyperlinks. This is why I have used footnotes, not endnotes. I don’t want to hunt and rifle through endnotes while I’m reading. I don’t know why anyone else would.

The use of ellipses in quoted text indicates that I have shortened a quotation, but readers who wish to consult my unedited interviews will be able to do so. Following the paperback publication of this book, I will donate my recordings and transcripts to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. I will also give them to the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, where they will join the Thatcher Papers.

For consistency, I have changed British to American spelling, even when quoting British source material, although I have not changed proper names (such as the “British Labour Party”). For brevity, and because British honorifics are generally meaningless to Americans, I have mostly eschewed them—I refer, for example, to “Thatcher” rather than “Lady Thatcher,” or “Baroness Thatcher” as she has in turn been titled. I mean no disrespect by this, only warm American informality and an eagerness to get straight to the point.