child, this gangly southern belle graduated to drinking straight gin from water glasses before she left high school.

The stellar success of her first novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter convinced Carson to move to the literary capitol of New York. Attending a ferocious flurry of cocktail parties thrown in her honor, she took no small amount of pleasure in shocking the gathered intelligentsia — not with boorish behavior (she was generally quite shy), but by showing them how much booze a young lady from the South could put away. Carson possessed a prodigious capacity for liquor and reveled in sending large proud Yankees staggering home while she drank deeper into the night.

In towns and villages as well as here in the capital, Christian vigilantes wielding machetes haveIron Lady is vaguely associated with some key concepts (monetarism, unemployment) and crucial events (the Falklands War, the Poll Tax), but beyond that it gets a little hazy.

The ideology that bears her name, Thatcherism, is usually said to have changed Britain, emphasising the free economy and strong state, market liberalism and social conservatism. Political change in the 1980s came in many forms, most notably reduced employment in the manufacturing industry, tax reform and heightened economic inequality, financial market deregulation, the privatisation of publicly owned industries and assets, and the sale of council houses. The speed and extent of these reforms suggest they were authorised by someone intent on leaving her mark. Moreover, social conflicts inherited from earlier decades were given a distinctive Thatcherite twist, from the trade unions