To be in with a chance to win the signed hardback and a T-shirt, answer the following question:

Which of these McEwan novels was recently made in to a film starring Kiera Knightly?

• Atonement
• On Chesil Beach
  
• Saturday

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1. Closing date for entries: April 3rd 2010.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Open to persons over 18 years of age only
4. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
5. The winners will be selected at random from those correct entries received before the closing date.
6. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger. Our decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
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Next week we’re kicking off Windmill’s presence on Bookhugger with a great competition, so make sure you visit us on Wednesday 24th March for your chance to win some cracking crime fiction.

In the meantime, why not get yourself aquainted with Windmill’s titles and authors by visiting their excellent (and shiny) new website and blog at http://www.windmill-books.co.uk/

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To celebrate its publication today, we have two tickets to see Ian McEwan in Manchester, worth £14 in total, up for grabs. To win them, answer the following question:

For which of his novels did McEwan win the Booker Prize?

• Amsterdam
• Enduring Love
• Atonement

The winner must be available to get to the event:

Ian McEwan in conversation with Sam Leith, supported by Waterstone’s, 91 Deansgate
Monday 22nd March at 6.30pm
Royal Northern College of Music, 124 Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9RD

Enter using the form:

Terms and conditions

1. Closing date for entries: March 19th 2010, 10pm.
2. Open to residents of the United Kingdom only.
3. Open to persons over 18 years of age only
4. Entry to the competition is by completion of the above form only. Anyone submitting multiple entries will be disqualified.
5. The winners will be selected at random from those correct entries received before the closing date.
6. Only the winning entrants will be contacted by Bookhugger. Our decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
7. The winner’s name(s) may be published on the Bookhugger website after the closing date of the competition.
8. The prize has no equivalent cash value.
9. The competition is not open to Bookhugger employees and their families, or to employees of Bookhugger publishers and their families.

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Welcome to the real world. When using real places and real historical figures in your fiction, do the familiar elements make it easier for the reader to focus on the core of the story? How do you stop it becoming a distraction? And do you take liberties to meet the needs of the story?

Nicola Upson

It was Josephine Tey herself who, writing as Gordon Daviot, said that to write fiction about historic fact is ‘very nearly impermissible’ and – for someone who wrote several historical plays and novels – she took a dim view of mixing the two. Ironically, her life is the perfect place to do just that: Tey’s work is known and loved, but she rolled up the carpet of her personal life quite beautifully behind her, leaving those of us who are fascinated by the woman as well as the writer to argue over a few known facts. Her great genius as a novelist was to create stories that could be read on many levels – thought of as products from the Golden Age and remembered with fondness or nostalgia, or recognised as subversive and unsettling, way ahead of their time and the product of a very modern voice; the more I find out about her, the more I realise that she played that trick with her life, too, and just as effectively. Even the name ‘Josephine Tey’ is a fiction, one of two literary personalities which she created to distance her work from her real identity as Elizabeth Mackintosh; the creation of a persona extended into her private life, and who she was at any given moment depended on where she was and whom she was with; her neighbours in Inverness would scarcely have recognised the woman who was sought-after company in London’s West End, and vice versa.

These books unashamedly mix what I know about her life with an invented murder mystery, but, rather than using facts as a signpost into the story, I’m using fictional situations to deconstruct some of the mythologies about her. The plots for the crime story always emerge from her state of mind or particular events in her life; she was a complex, often contradictory woman, easy to fall in love with but sometimes hard to like, and telling her story over a period of time, allowing her to change and develop in response to the people she meets along the way, feels more truthful to me now than the straightforward biography which I originally set out to write.

Joe Kanon: I hope you haven’t given up on this. Her many fans, of whom I’m certainly one, would love to read a good biography and who better than you to do it?

There are several other real figures in the books, but very few real names: they’re detective stories in the classical English sense, and the puzzle is a crucial part of the story. To ask a reader to believe that it might be John Gielgud ‘whodunnit’ at the end of the novel is a leap of faith too far; but to suggest that the culprit may be John Terry, who just happens to share a lot of Gielgud’s characteristics, is another matter altogether. There’s no question that guessing what’s real and what isn’t is part of the attraction for some readers, although the elements which people single out as being my invention are, more often than not, part of a real biographical thread; but if the story is compelling enough, if the characters are believable within the context of that story, they will always be real to the reader – and that’s what matters most.

James Bradley: I think that’s absolutely correct: what matters is that a book work, not whether it’s accurate. Part of the process of working with real characters and real places is managing to find the spaces into which you can insert your story, and making it fit with what really went on, but the really important thing is never to lose sight of the fact that the story and the characters are the thing that really matters

Place is vital to that – the creation of a real environment provides a context for your characters to live and work in, love and hate in, and the more believable the setting, the more true to life the people; in Angel With Two Faces, the characters are all created by the Cornish community in which they were born and – because it’s a real place, and one that’s very special to me, it’s important to reflect it honestly. With the exception of the central murder – it’s a necessary evil of crime novels that you pay tribute to places you love by filling them with violence and death – all of the stories in that book are true; liberties are taken with when and how, because the structure of a novel is artifice – but the essence, I hope, is authentic.

If there’s ever a day of reckoning, and Elizabeth Mackintosh and I get to have that conversation , I’ve no doubt there will be a list of points which she’ll want to discuss with me – but I hope the overall picture for the reader is fair and sympathetic. With Tey herself, there’s only one hard and fast rule that I make myself stick to – and that’s never to make her do or say something which I know in my heart goes against her true character. Except, of course, to involve her in a series of unpleasant murders.

Claude Izner: The way you write about mixing fiction and reality is very interesting, for that’s exactly what we – Liliane and Laurence – like to do. We’re sorry to kill people in our stories, but, as you point out, it is alas necessary in a crime story! In fact, what we like most is visiting 1900 Paris with our book-seller, Victor Legris, who has to solve a mystery, but who also meets real or imaginary characters living in this wonderful town, (at the time, a patchwork of villages) some very poor, some very rich, some both. We too have a pseudonym, Claude Izner; in “reality” we are two sisters, Liliane and Laurence, so Claude Izner sometimes seems to be a third person, very mysterious to us!

Claude Izner

Our Victor Legris series of murder mysteries is set in late 19th century Paris, and we love to use real historical figures and events. The realistic framework allows us to imagine some very unrealistic situations for our detective, a bookseller who finds himself having to solve murders, every year from 1889 to 1900.

In France we are published by a collection called ‘Grands Détectives’. It is a collection of titles in which an epoch and a country or town is recreated and a detective story introduced into the setting. Readers of the collection are fond of the authors, many of whom are not French, because they know they do their best to be historically accurate but at the same time to invent sleuthing adventures that will carry the reader away on the wings of the past. Fantastic stories provide a nice escape from day-to-day reality. Sometimes people need to forget the present, but of course, even stories set in the past have lessons for the contemporary world.

We do our best to get into the skin of our heroes, and to see the ‘Belle Époque’ through their eyes, without being too didactic about facts or details; we try to integrate real-life events, that might be boring if told factually, naturally into our stories.

James Bradley: It’s fascinating the way we increasingly ask novels and works of fiction to do the work of history (and indeed the way history, particularly television history, is now so infected with the methods of fiction). In a way the novel’s come full circle since it’s beginning: early novels such as Robinson Crusoe were facsimiles of factual narratives (though in Crusoe’s case, it was a facsimile of a brand of factual narrative that was often fake, in a James Frey, Million Little Pieces kind of way). It then mutated over a very long period of time into a creature of the imagination which created a world which so resembled the real we accepted it as real. But here. Yet here we are, at the beginning of the 21st century, and we’re trying to create fictional narratives that resemble reality, not just by incorporating real events and people, and by educating, but – often as not – by pastiching the tone and language fo the period we’re writing about. We don’t just write historical novels, we write historical novels that do their best to look and sound like novels of the period they’re set in. It’s totally fascinating, not just because of the wonderful inventiveness and variouness of books such as Claude’s, but because it seems so much a part of a series of other shifts that are taking place in the way we think about truth and reality and fiction.

We do take some liberties to meet the needs of the story (not many!). For example, we have real writers and painters coming into Victor Legris’s bookshop – Anatole France, Georges Courteline, Jules Renard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec amongst others). But in the main, we are very precise about the period we have chosen, and we are particularly careful to avoid anachronistic vocabulary, and to introduce our readers to popular nineteenth century expressions and songs.

Joe Kanon: I’m very much interested in the vocabulary question. One has to keep contemporary slang out (I’m sure we all agree) but where do you draw the line about what to use from the past? I find that some slang is so dated that even though it may actually have been used its appearance in the book draws attention to itself, not the narrative. An example: the word “swell” which people really did use but which now sticks out, an obvious attempt at ‘period detail’. How do you decide what to use? A case by case basis?

Nicola Upson: Despite their being period fiction, people often comment – some as a compliment, others as criticism – that there’s a modern feel to the books I write, that the characters’ morality is not of its time – and I’m always pleased to hear that; the books are detective stories but they’re not Golden Age novels, and they’re not meant as a pastiche of that genre – they’re novels written in a modern voice about people who happened to live in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and one of the most interesting things for me in developing the series has been to write about lives in a more honest and less judgemental way than it was possible for contemporary authors to do. It may mean that attitudes to, say, violence, homosexuality, incest or adultery are differently or more overtly expressed in my books than they would have been in crime novels of the time – but that’s not to say that the attitudes themselves are at odds with what really went on. It’s easy to be patronising about period fiction, to look at people through a glass screen as if they never swore or had sex or understood what it meant to cross a moral line, but you only have to read the letters and diaries of women from that period to know that the public image was very different from the private reality. As far as language goes, I probably do use the odd anachronism in speech, but it’s important for me that the characters feel real to a modern reader; they need to sound to us as they would have sounded to each other, and that means removing the barriers which would be created by a more formal, artificial style.

Joseph Kanon

Place is important to me – I’ve even used endpaper maps in my books. Getting the streets right, the buildings, the distances. anchors the narrative, gives it that first layer of plausibility. This is especially useful if you write in period, when the look of a place also positions you in time.

Of course, in the end the settings are still imaginary reconstructions, particularly if the place has changed a great deal. Both Los Alamos and Berlin (The Good German) have been completely rebuilt since 1945 so photographs become the key source. Stardust presented a different challenge. Los Angeles is virtually the poster city for impermanence, but in fact a lot of 1945 Hollywood survives. Almost every setting in the book still exists (see the video about this on my website). What’s changed is the sprawling scale of the city itself. In 1945 there were no freeways. Orange groves still covered most of the valley. People rode streetcars. So the streets, even the buildings, may be the same, but they exist in a different world.

My usual location scouting for a book is simply walking the city (or, in L.A., driving it), getting a feel for it on the ground. By the time you’re ready to write, you should know where your characters live, what they eat, everything that will make them real to the reader. But this can sometimes produce disconcerting results. I went to Berlin to film a promotional TV interview for The Good German and the director (a fan of the book) would say, “Let’s shoot this in front of Lena’s flat,” and I’d answer, “Well, it would have been on this stretch of Pariserstrasse, probably a building like that.” “Yes, but which flat? Which is her window?” “But you understand she’s a character. She didn’t really live anywhere. I made her up.” At which point, he would look at me skeptically, a little disappointed, as if I were holding out on him. I suppose I should have been flattered. Lena had become ‘real’ for him, what we always hope fiction will do—until you have to supply an actual address.

James Bradley: I’m always interested by the way imaginary versions of cities overlay the real ones, and by the desire of readers to pin the imaginary versions to the real ones. In a way I suppose it’s part of the same desire to make the experience of a book concrete you see in the desire to make pilgrimages to authors’ homes. But it’s not quite the same thing. There’s a whole society of people who spend their time poring over Conan Doyle’s stories, trying to pin down where precisely 221B Baker Street is, but somehow missing the point that there isn’t a 221B Baker Street because Conan Doyle made it up. What is it they’re looking for? The experience of the books to continue? To make the books real, in some more concrete sense? Or just a sort of cultural completism, sort of a literary train-spotting? Whichever it is, it’s a strange desire, and not one I suspect, that’s really able to be satisfied.

Yet at the same time, our ideas of cities and places is inextricably connected to fictional representations of them. It’s almost impossible to imagine early to mid-19th century London without it being the London of Dickens’ imagination, or late 19th century London without it being the London of Conan Doyle, all gaslight and fog and murder in alleys. These fictional representations sit alongside the real, and alter it, shaping our cultural memory.

Using real places is crucial, but using real people is another matter. The problem here is that the reader inevitably brings his own idea of the character to the page, and yours often doesn’t mesh with the character already in his head. At best this is a distraction, at worst, an argument with the reader that interrupts the narrative. (Of course, writers may do this deliberately, to challenge preconceptions.)

But sometimes using real figures is unavoidable. In Los Alamos, only the head of the Manhattan Project could have authorized the investigation at the heart of the story. I had mixed feelings about using Oppenheimer and planned a quick scene just to just past this plot point, but the moment he appeared—one of those writing clichés that is sometimes true—he took over the book and I realized that for me he was the story, that he embodied all the contradictions and moral ambiguities about the Project that had drawn me to the subject in the first place.

I also used some real figures in Stardust—it seemed impossible to write about Hollywood without using any boldface names—but I deliberately chose people who had been real stars in 1945 but would be less well known now. Paulette Goddard, for instance, has a speaking part and at a party we see Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith, et al. The idea was that movie buffs would have fun spotting the celebrities, but that the line between the real stars and the fictional ones would be blurred (making the fictional ones more real). But this backfired slightly: younger readers hadn’t heard of any of these people and so assumed that everyone in the book was fictional. So I succeeded in blurring the line, but at the expense of making me feel a lot older.

Claude Izner: Yes, place is very important. In our novels, Paris is the real first character. To help us to recreate this vanished 1900 town, we like to walk a lot together, to notice every small details, to take notes and photos, and to invent the past behind the present. We also look at people in Paris today and try to change them into characters that could fit into our stories. We think that, whatever book you write, it is full of what you are, what you like, read, saw, heard, your desires, your fears. And, as we are two, all this is multiplied by two! We also use old Paris pictures and maps, to set a more realistic scenery. And famous people do appear from time to time. But it is true that, for young readers, all this means little. Once again, the challenge is always the same: to invent a good story and characters that are like no others. That is the core of all books, historical or not.

James Bradley

I think it’s fascinating how agitated we’ve all become about the whole question of how fiction draws upon the “real”, and about what’s legitimate and what’s not. In my darker moments I think that agitation is about a loss of faith in the idea of fiction itself, an anxiety about what it is, and what it does (certainly it’s not accidental the first question you get asked about a book these days is always about research, not about the writing, or the aesthetics), but it’s equally related to the way our culture is being reshaped from the ground up by media technology, and the increasingly blurry line between what’s real and what’s not.

Joe Kanon: I couldn’t agree with you more. The research question has come up so often over the past few years that I came up with the following theory: the more we’ve come to accept spin and fantasy in our public life (Iraq, anyone?) the more we’re demanding authenticity in our fiction. This is a joke (sort of) but it does lead to the larger question you raise: what do we expect fiction to do? And it’s a special kind of authenticity that seems required. People are invariably disappointed when I answer that all my research was taken from print or photographic sources (memoirs, letters, histories, etc.). What they want to hear is that I interviewed people who might actually have been in the story (e.g., a scientist at Los Alamos), that only this sort of direct testimony is ‘real’. When I point out that, faulty memories being what they are, print sources (especially a variety of them) are more reliable, they seem unconvinced. Hard to say why this is so but it somehow shades into the current mania for memoirs—and the subsequent outrage when it’s discovered the memoirs aren’t actually ‘true’ but (let’s be generous here) shaped by literary considerations. It’s as if our popular culture is moving away from what literature can do—the re-ordering of experience to reveal a larger truth—and opting for a Facebook kind of authenticity, supposedly intimate but no more reliable or truthful than a personal ad.

All of that said, as a writer I’ve always been a bit wary of over-emphasisng the role of research. At some deep level it seems to me that as a writer your responsibility is to the story, and to the way you’re telling it, and everything else is subservient to that. Indeed often too much research can be a trap, because you begin to feel constrained by it, as if you have a responsibility to what really happened.

Nicola Upson: That’s very true and I certainly feel a responsibility to Tey, perhaps because I like and respect what I know about her and the way she chose to live her life, or perhaps because she’s so well-loved by her readers. But as the series goes on, I find I’m much less self-conscious about that – and, ironically, the less I worry about making the character an accurate portrayal of the real woman, the more authentic she becomes. Readers who come to the series looking for clues about her life will probably find more facts in An Expert in Murder – but more truth about her personality in Angel With Two Faces and Two for Sorrow.

I’ve had at least one novel fall over because I let the research overwhelm me, so generally I try to learn enough to write the story and then fill in around it. You need to know enough to feel comfortable in the world you’re writing about, but ultimately it’s imagination that will make a story breathe, the sense that the writing and the characters are alive.

That doesn’t make everybody happy. When The Resurrectionist was first published in Australia, a historian who’d written a book about the body trade took the novel to task in a major newspaper for reducing real figures such as Sir Astley Cooper to mere essences, and for its supposed haziness about the specifics of how surgeons were trained in the period I was writing about. It was a curious moment, not least because I could understand where she was coming from: if I was a historian and some upstart novelist came along and published a book which played it fast and loose with the facts I’d be irritated too. But I was almost more than a little bemused: in fact I wasn’t hazy about the specifics of medical education in the period, it was just that they were complicated, and boring, and trying to represent them accurately made the book more convoluted than it needed to be, so at some point I’d taken a decision readers weren’t going to care about them, and I’d just streamline them to make the story work better. I was writing a novel, after all, not a thesis, and what mattered was that it live as fiction, not that it be accurate in every respect.

In Australia the situation is doubly problematic because our history is so vexed. There’s been an ongoing debate here about the rights and wrongs of Australian novelists trying to talk about the past, and in particular the history of first contact and colonisation through the prism of fiction. This debate has been part of a much larger ideological struggle over what sense we’re to make of our past (and indeed what that past actually was) but it also seems to me to come back to our increasing anxiety about what fiction is, and does, and a failure to adequately respect the sorts of ecstatic truths fiction aspires to.

Claude Izner: It’s true that research can be a problem! When we began the Legris books, we had never written historical novels, and we were frantic about the documentation. We had to learn to resist the temptation to write a thesis, as you say, and remember that we were writing a novel. The most important thing for us is to create a good detective story, and it is also, for us, the hardest. The history has to seem natural, we have to give the right details at the right time, so that the result is not too didactic.

The panellists

James Bradley was born in 1967. He has twice been named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists and has won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Literature Award, the Kathleen Mitchell Literary Award and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. He is the author of a collection of poetry called Paper Nautilus and the novels Wrack, The Deep Field and The Resurrectionist. In 2008 The Resurrectionist was chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, becoming a massive bestseller. James lives in Sydney.

Claude Izner is the pen-name of two sisters, Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefèvre. Both booksellers on the banks of the Seine, they are experts on nineteenth-century Paris. They have co-written Murder on the Eiffel Tower, The Père-Lachaise Mystery and The Montmartre Investigation. The fourth Victor Legris Mystery The Marais Assassin was published in March 2009. The Predator of Batignolles, the 5th Victor Legris title, will be published in April 2010.

Joseph Kanon was  born in Pennsylvania and was educated at Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge.  While still an undergraduate at Harvard, he began a career in publishing. In 1995, on a visit to the Southwest, he visited Los Alamos and conceived the ideal for a novel about the Manhattan Project.  Los Alamos, published in 1997 was a best-seller, translated into 20 languages, and won the Edgar Award for best first novel.  Now a full-time writer, he followed it with The Prodigal Spy , The Good German, Alibi, and Stardust.

Nicola Upson was born in Suffolk and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. She has worked in theatre and as a freelance journalist, and is the author of two non-fiction works and the recipient of an Escalator Award from the Arts Council England. She lives with her partner in Cambridge, and spends much of her time in Cornwall.

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I would just like to remember some words of Saint Francis of Assisi which I think are just particularly apt at the moment. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.

My school was in Solihull, the second safest Conservative seat in the country, and the whole place was pulsating with excitement at the Conservative election victory – all the same, I think that most of my classmates thought that the speech was pretty mad.

I remember with equal clarity where I was when it ended. I was walking down a back street near Euston station on 28 November 1990. I looked up and saw a sign that someone had placed against an office window. It said: ‘She’s gone.’ Anyone seeing it that day would have known that Margaret Thatcher had resigned as prime minister.

It is not just self-indulgence that makes me begin this book with personal reminiscence. There was something about Margaret Thatcher’s premiership that cut deeply into the personal lives of many British people. In 1985 psychiatrists produced an interesting piece of research that illustrated this. Generally, patients suffering from dementia forget things about the present whilst remembering things that are more permanent. For most of the post-war period, for example, many demented people knew that Queen Elizabeth II was the monarch but could not remember who was the prime minister. Under Thatcher things changed: ‘Mrs Thatcher has given an item of knowledge to demented patients that they would otherwise have lacked: she reaches those parts of the brain other prime ministers could not reach.’

References to Margaret Thatcher suffuse British culture. The head of drama commissioning at the BBC remarked in 2005: ‘the Eighties and Nineties are the new Victorian drama. Contemporary writers are now looking to this era and Thatcher’s influence is huge.’ Speeches delivered in her strange, unnaturally deep voice, the product of careful coaching by her advisers, are used, often incongruously juxtaxposed with the music of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, as a soundtrack to television programmes about the 1980s. Her phrases – ‘The Lady’s not for turning’ or ‘There is no such thing as Society’ – are quoted, though the first of these was coined by someone else and the second is usually quoted out of context. She features in films and plays. She has walk-on parts in novels such as Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004). There has even been a musical produced about her career.

This intense focus on Thatcher as a personality, or as a legend, has gone with a declining interest in what her government actually did. The most widely cited works on ‘Thatcherism’ – those by Gamble, Jacques, Jenkins (Peter), Jessop, Kavanagh, Riddell, Skidelsky and Young – were written before Thatcher’s resignation. Stuart Hall’s influential article was published whilst Thatcher was still leader of the opposition. Much was written by journalists, political scientists or left-wing activists, whose interest in Thatcherism was associated with a desire to devise strategies against it. Most of these people moved on to new interests when Thatcher fell. Even the emphasis on the extent to which Thatcherism’s legacy has endured goes, curiously, with a tendency to downplay its importance – Margaret Thatcher is often now presented as though her main historical function was to serve as John the Baptist for Tony Blair.

There has also been a persistent tension in writing about the 1980s between an interest in Thatcher and an interest in Thatcherism. Academic writers, especially those of the Left, felt uncomfortable with the personalization of analysis – uncomfortable too, perhaps, with the ways in which attention to the character of Margaret Thatcher could slide into sexism. In his article of January 1979, Stuart Hall used ‘Thatcherism’ seven times and referred to ‘Mrs Thatcher’ only once. Discussion of the Thatcher government amongst the wider population always laid a heavier emphasis on Margaret Thatcher the woman. Striking miners were said ‘universally’ to use the Rider Hagardesque term ’she’ for the prime minister. Tory canvassers got so used to hearing the phrase ‘that bloody woman’ that functionaries in Central Office devised the acronym ‘TBW’ – until an unkind interviewer enlightened her, Mrs Thatcher herself thought that the letters stood for the name of a television station. Most of all, there was a cloyingly fake intimacy in the way in which the name ‘Maggie’ entered general circulation. Demonstrators shouted ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out.’ Long-suffering audiences at Tory conferences were induced to sing the excruciating ‘Hello Maggie’ to the tune of ‘Hello Dolly’. An excited Norwegian commentator celebrated his country’s defeat of the England football team in 1981 by shouting into the microphone: ‘Can you hear me Maggie Thatcher? Your boys took a hell of a beating tonight.’

The focus of my own book is on Thatcherism as a project rather than Thatcher as a person. My feeling is that John Campbell’s biography of Margaret Thatcher has probably taken us as close to understanding the woman as we are ever likely to get – perhaps closer than she (a person with little taste for introspection) ever got herself. Having said this, I think that the word ‘Thatcherism’ itself became the centre of a debate that sometimes obscured more than it revealed. Many scholars, and at least one of Thatcher’s own ministers, assume that the term was invented by the sociologist Stuart Hall in January 1979. However, as time went on, many writers became uncomfortable with the word and, as was often the case with debates of the 1980s, the two sides of the political spectrum expressed themselves in remarkably similar ways. On the Right, T. E. Utley wrote that ‘Thatcherism’ was a ‘monstrous invention’ that made the government seem more original than it really was. On the Left, Bob Jessop complained that his fellow Marxists had created a ‘monstrous monolith’ by presenting Thatcherism as a coherent phenomenon, overemphasizing the importance of ideology and downplaying the role of division, conjuncture and disagreement.

In fact, the word ‘Thatcherism’ was quite widely used before January 1979 – Thatcher used it, in a flippant aside, in March 1975. The mere fact that the term came into general use suggests a recognition that Margaret Thatcher was associated with something novel and distinctive. However, using the word ‘Thatcherism’ did not imply some platonic absolute of ideological purity that marked a complete break with everything that had gone before it. One should not assume that displays of pragmatism reveal Thatcherism to be somehow ‘false’ because it had failed to live up to abstract ideas that existed in the pamphlets of the Institute of Economic Affairs or the mind of Alfred Sherman. Thatcherism was always about power, and it is the nature of power to adjust to circumstances.

The aims of my account are modest ones. I am aware that, as this book goes to press, I will for the first time be teaching students who were born after Margaret Thatcher resigned. I think there is a need for an account of this period that is designed for people who have no personal memories of it. I have tried to explain who the dramatis personae were, what they stood for, and to answer the simplest of questions: what happened next?

My account is more événementiel than most books on the Thatcher government. When Margaret Thatcher was still leader of the opposition, one of her advisers talked of the need to develop ‘event-led communication’. It seems to me that events such as the 1981 budget, the Falklands War or the miners’ strike probably did more to communicate Thatcherism than the speeches of Sir Keith Joseph. I have stressed the difference between the Conservative Party in opposition from 1975 to 1979 and the party in government – as well as the differences between its various governments. Even my thematic chapters (notably that on Europe) are designed largely to show how thinking on particular issues evolved over time.

I have tried to strike a middle way between the very personalized biographical approaches that revolve around anecdotal details of ‘Maggie’ and the bloodlessly theoretical approaches that revolve around concepts such as ‘relative autonomy of the state’ or ‘hegemony’. I have tried to give attention to the characters of people other than Thatcher and, in particular, to restore her ministers to the story. Thatcher’s flamboyant style sometimes overshadowed that of her colleagues – one writer talked of ‘a tyrant surrounded by pygmies’. A number of Thatcher’s personal advisers or backbench supporters – Gardiner, Sherman and Mount – have also implied that the serious decisions were taken around Thatcher’s kitchen table rather than in formal meetings of the cabinet. My own feeling is that Thatcherism makes more sense if it is examined in large measure through ministers. Studied in purely abstract terms, it is sometimes hard to pin down what Thatcherism was. It is, however, relatively easy to identify who, on the Conservative front bench, were Thatcherites. Few would, I think, deny this title to Howe, Lawson, Nott, Ridley and Tebbit. Ministers are crucial figures when it comes to seeing how the ideas dreamt up in think tanks here converted into policy.

There is one character in this story who was not a minister under Thatcher and never, indeed, a member of the Conservative Party during her leadership of it. I have given considerable attention to Enoch Powell. I should stress that the most important part of the chapter title ‘Thatcherism before Thatcher?’ is the question mark, and that my own answer to the question would be ‘no’. Having said that, Powell does seem to me to be a uniquely important figure in the history of British Conservatism. He thought about many of the matters that concerned Thatcherites and he expressed his conclusions with a degree of clarity and force that they rarely achieved. He also thought about issues – ‘Englishness’, the end of Empire, Ulster – about which most Thatcherites were revealingly silent. Tory ministers regarded him with a mixture of admiration, exasperation and fear. If Thatcherism is to be understood in terms of intellectual history, Powell is vastly more important than any number of Austrian philosophers, American economists or earnest young men at the Adam Smith Institute. Powell is also important because he was a practising politician even if not, judged in conventional terms, a successful one. He understood the realities of power and, for this reason, was often the most eloquent commentator on the differences between Thatcherism and his own ‘purer’ vision of politics.

I think that I differ most sharply from other recent historians in terms of the historical context in which I seek to place Thatcher. David Cannadine, Peter Clark and Ewen Green14 – came to look at Thatcherism after having worked on earlier periods of British history. Not surprisingly, they were very exercised by the occasional references of Thatcherites to the nineteenth century or to ‘Victorian values’, one of them even believed that he had invented this phrase. I am sceptical about all this. I do not believe that Thatcherism seriously sought to make itself the heir to nineteenth-century liberalism, and I think that the occasional references by Thatcherite ministers to Gladstonianism probably had more to do with electoral strategy at a time when the Liberal/Social Democrat alliance was doing well in the polls than with serious thought about the nineteenth century.

I am also sceptical about interpretations that lay much emphasis on thinking in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War or in rejection of the ‘post-war consensus’. In many ways, I see Thatcher as the defender of the post-war consensus (especially in the form in which it was expressed during the 1950s) against the ‘progressive consensus’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thatcher herself, and some of her ministers, made much of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (first published in 1945), which had sought to defend the free market against ’socialists of all parties’. It is not, however, clear that Thatcher herself read this book until quite late in her career. I suspect that this work merely provided a convenient philosophical polish on things that Thatcherites wanted to do for reasons that had little to do with Hayek’s thinking. When Norman Tebbit was interviewed in 1986, he referred to the writings of ‘Fred what’s his name’; only when an official from Central Office stepped in did it became clear that he was referring to Hayek. Green presents Richard Law, the Conservative MP whose Return from Utopia (1951) defended free-market Conservatism against the encroaching state, as a kind of proto Thatcherite, but I doubt whether many people, other than historians who are concerned with Thatcherism’s intellectual ancestry, have ever paid much attention to his book. It is unclear whether any minister in the Thatcher government had heard of Law at the time they held power.

I see Thatcherism as rooted in a specific time – it emerged out of debates on national decline, trade union power and economic modernization during the 1970s and it ceased to be relevant when those issues became less pressing. If I was forced to give precise dates for a ‘Thatcher era’, then I would suggest 1968-88. The period stretched from Thatcher’s ‘What’s wrong with Politics?’ speech, which can be seen, though only in retrospect, as the first sign that Thatcher represented a distinctive political vision, until her Bruges speech of 1988, which can be seen as the first sign that Thatcherism was beginning to break up.

There are writers, of whom the most prominent is Simon Jenkins, who see Thatcherism as having a life beyond Thatcher’s resignation in 1990 and who, in particular, are interested in the way that Thatcher laid the foundations of New Labour. Obviously, Thatcher changed Britain in ways that mean that we all now live with her legacy. However, Thatcherism cannot be understood unless we recognize the remoteness of the recent past. Thatcher came to power less than twenty five years after the end of the Second World War. Almost half the members of her first cabinet had fought in that war – three of them had been wounded; four had been decorated for gallantry.  This compares to Margaret Thatcher’s immediate successor as prime minister, who had grown up since the Second World War, or to his two successors, both men born after 1945. Tony Blair’s first government in 1997 did not contain a single minister who had ever worn military uniform. Thatcher’s world was dominated by the Cold War. For the whole of her premiership, there really were weapons of mass destruction pointed at London. This coloured not just her attitude to the Soviet Union but her attitude to Europe (especially West Germany), the United States, trade unions in Britain and Britain’s status in the world. The political map changed almost beyond recognition as the Soviet Union reformed during the late 1980s; I think that inability to adjust to these changes partly explains why Thatcherism became less successful during this period. The economy in the early 1980s was different from the economy of the early twenty-first century in ways that cannot be captured with mere statistics. As I lectured on Thatcherism in 2008, I looked at the rows of tiny, garishly coloured mobile phones that my students had laid out on the desks in front of them and I recalled how, when I myself was a student, the Spectator had run a series of articles devoted to the difficulty of getting the nationalized Post Office to install a new phone line in the magazine’s offices.

This book is designed to be dispassionate. I was very much opposed to the Thatcher government when it was in power (or, at least, I often said I was – it is sobering to realize how hard I find it to recapture my own real feelings), and I have never been seriously tempted to vote Conservative. However, I have often felt exasperated by the partisan nature of writing on this subject and particularly by the sneering tone many authors adopt with regard to Margaret Thatcher herself.

Many French historians have managed to write interesting and sympathetic books about de Gaulle and his regime, even when they themselves had opposed him during his life. I feel that it is time British historians attempt to do the same for Margaret Thatcher. I have tried to avoid posing the Sellar and Yeatmanish question of whether or not Thatcher was a ‘good thing’. However, it does seem to me that a little humility on this matter is in order from those of us who denounced Thatcher when she was in power. Many of us claimed repeatedly that the government’s policies were so obviously wrong-headed that they were bound to bring some signal disaster. We should now have the grace to recognize that the signal disaster never arrived and that, at least in its own terms, the government was often – though not always – successful.

Perhaps I should finish the introduction by marking out the limits of this book. This is very largely about what Maurice Cowling, a historian sometimes seen as having been involved in the transformation of Conservative thought during the 1970s, labelled as ‘high politics’. I have made three quite long excursions outside the high politics of the Tory party. One of these involves the Labour Party and the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s, one of them involves the Falklands War and one of them involves the miners’ strike of 1984-5. I think that all three were particularly important for the Thatcher government. I also think that analysts of Thatcherism have sometimes been too prone to treat all three as though they were acts of God. The electoral collapse of the Labour Party, British victory in the South Atlantic and the poor tactics of Arthur Scargill are invoked as evidence that Margaret Thatcher was ‘lucky’. Thatcher clearly was lucky (no one would survive as prime minister for ten years unless they had some spectacular good fortune). But there was more to it than luck. Sometimes, the failure of Thatcher’s enemies had deeper causes, often related to the social changes that had brought Thatcher to power in the first place; sometimes, it was due, to a greater extent than the government’s critics have cared to concede, to skilful management by Thatcher and her colleagues.

Having said all this, I have not tried to write a social history of Britain in the 1980s. I have not, for example, attempted any serious research on whether British people during this decade were increasingly likely to define themselves in terms of consumption rather than work. I have discussed questions such as ‘why did many British coal miners return to work before their union authorized them to do so during the strike of 1984-5?’; ‘why did people buy their council houses?’ or, for that matter, ‘why did they vote Conservative?’ on the basis of information that is already in the public domain.

Equally, this is not a history of the world from 1975 to 1990. Thatcher existed in an international context. Her positions on many issues, not just those directly relating to the Soviet Union, were born of the Cold War. Her political demise was in many ways, associated with the fact that reform in the Soviet Union shot away the foundations of her political world. It would be possible to write a different kind of history that presented Thatcherism as one element in a global transition and which attempted to discern the extent to which changes in Britain were effects or causes of a change that brought down Soviet Communism and strengthened capitalism in most of the world. On the whole, my interests have been confined to looking at the extent to which British politics were influenced by events in the wider world. I have not attempted to say how far British policy influenced those wider events or, for that matter, to say very much about the extent to which Thatcherism might have been part of a wider pattern. I do think that looking at the international context can be useful on one very simple level: it cuts Britain down to size. Thatcher led the British Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. During these years, China saw all the extraordinary upheaval that lay between the death of Chairman Mao and the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The year Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party was also the year Vaclav Havel wrote his open letter to the president of Czechoslovakia – a brave and, as it seemed at the time, hopeless gesture of defiance against authoritarianism. In 1990 Havel, himself now president of the Czechoslovkia, dined in Downing Street. Between 1975 and 1990, Chile went from the worst years of state-sponsored murder to being, more or less, a democracy. All this reminds us that the Anglocentric obsession with Thatcherism as a ‘revolution’ needs to be judged against countries where politics really could be a matter of life and death.

© Richard Vinen 2009

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Suddenly she has no classes to teach, no new research to conduct, no invited lectures to give. Ever again. Unable to work, read and, increasingly, take care of herself, Alice struggles to find meaning and purpose in her everyday life as her concept of self gradually slips away. But Alice is a remarkable woman, and her family, yoked by history and DNA and love, discover more about her and about each other, in their quest to keep the Alice they know for as long as possible.

Losing her yesterdays, her short-term memory hanging on by a couple of frayed threads, she is living in the moment, living for each day. But she is still Alice.

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In It’s Only a Movie, Mark Kermode takes us into the weird world of a life lived in widescreen. Join him as he embarks on a gut-wrenching journey through the former Soviet Union on the trail of the low-budget horror flick Dark Waters, cringe as he’s handbagged by Helen Mirren at the BAFTA awards ceremony, cheer as he gets thrown out of the Cannes Film Festival for heckling in very bad French, and don’t forget to gasp as he’s shot at while interviewing Werner Herzog in the Hollywood Hills. Written with sardonic wit and wry good humour, this compelling cinematic memoir is genuinely ‘inspired by real events’.

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To be in with a chance to win one of three copies of It’s Only a Movie, simply listen to the podcast and answer the following question:

What was the first film that Mark Kermode has an active memory of watching?

• Krakatoa: East of Java
• The Italian Job
  
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

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Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is a collection of short stories about the battlefields that exist in seemingly benign domestic spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. A young ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front steps. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. In all of the stories, people are torn between different versions of their lives, trying to maintain two opposing possibilities at once.

What was your inspiration for writing the collection?

This collection really started with the Granta list. I was working on a novel when Granta asked if I had a new short story for their Best Young American Novelists issue—and they needed it in a month. I had published a few stories in magazines, but I didn’t have anything new ready, so I got out the few half-finished stories that still seemed promising. (I abandon lots of stories for good, but a few seemed fixable.) After I started working on the stories, and seeing ways to make them better, I got used to the pace again, and wrote more stories, and then a collection started to seem more urgent than a novel.

About Maile Meloy

Maile Meloy’s first novel, Liars and Saints, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and was a Richard and Judy Summer Read. She is also the author of the novel A Family Daughter and the story collection Half in Love. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Prospect, and other publications. In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists, and her new collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, was selected as one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2009.

Read a story from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

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Isaac is the smartest kid in town, left behind to care for his sick father after his mother commits suicide and his sister Lee moves away. Now Isaac wants out too. Not even his best friend, Billy Poe, can stand in his way: broad-shouldered Billy, always ready for a fight, still living in his mother’s trailer. Then, on the very day of Isaac’s leaving, something happens that changes the friends’ fates and tests the loyalties of their friendship and those of their lovers, families, and the town itself.

Evoking John Steinbeck’s novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, Philipp Myer’s American Rust is an extraordinarily moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendance, and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

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