One of the fascinations of this biography is the way Charles Moore searches for the underlying personality of Margaret Thatcher, whom he admires but cannot fully relate to. Good biographies, and this is an exceptionally good one, tell us things we did not know about the life of their subject. In the absence of any diaries, Moore draws on 150 letters that the then Margaret Roberts wrote to her sister, Muriel, from the end of the 1930s up to the beginning of the 1960s. These cover the war years, her time at school in Grantham, Somerville College, Oxford, where she went shortly before her 18th birthday in October 1943, and her attempts to become an MP.
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