As Britain’s Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, she transformed a nation with a social and economic revolution both admired and derided
Margaret Thatcher: Portrait of the Iron Lady
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Margaret Hilda Roberts (shown here at age 3 with her sister Muriel) was born on Oct. 13, 1925 above the grocery store owned by her father in Grantham, Lincolnshire. All her life, Margaret would profess admiration for the self-educated Alfred Roberts, a pious and parsimonious Methodist and local politician (he would become Grantham's mayor in 1945). She told one interviewer that she had owed an important lesson to her father: "You don't compromise on things that matter." She also learned the rigors of accounting from working in his shop. In contrast, throughout her life, she had barely anything to say about her mother Beatrice or her only sibling.