Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Educated at Eaton and Cambridge Charles Moore wrote for and edited three of the great English journals. The Daily Telegraph where he employed a young Boris Johnson, the Spectator, and the Sunday Telegraph. In 1997, Lady

Thatcher asked him to write her biography, naming two conditions, that she would never read the manuscript and that the work would appear only after her death.

Some two decades after he began the project, Charles Moore has published the third and final volume herself alone.

Raised to the peerage last October I should note Charles Moore now sits in the House of Lords

as the Lord Moore of Etchingham.

Charles, two quotations from herself alone.

One, she was master of the detail which appeared in the famous red boxes she worked on each night often until two in the morning.

She enjoyed political gossip, but it was the paper rather than the plotting on the so for discussion and cabinet which she saw as the primary means of governing.

Second quotation, the effect on others of her extraordinary personality made greater by the fact that she was a woman operating in world of men is often the story itself.

The paper and the personality. And I suppose this first question is really, of

course we come to her in a moment, but the first question is about technique.

For two decades, you're interweaving these two

in that very room, in which we see you now.

This is as sloppy a question as can be, but still it's the way it forms itself in my mind.

How did you do it?

Well, the funny thing is when you're doing this, Peter Peter you just sort of get on with it and questions present themselves and you try to solve them I didn't have a sort of theory of how to do it.

I'll just say this though that there are of course two basic sources the written ones and the oral

ones and because Mrs Thatcher had turned the key in the lot for me I had more or less

total access to both government paper and her own papers and access to all the people

who were closely associated with her and a lot of others who weren't so closely but it had something or other to do with her.

So interviewed 600 people for the books and then this massive, massive amount of paper because

she was a very busy lady as you already made clear and she was prime minister for so long 11

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