The real Margaret Thatcher

Here she is in 1961, after her appointment as Joint Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions:

From 1962, Thatcher complains that women MPs are limited to cabinet positions dealing with welfare and children and excluded from the major policy-making departments:

Interviewed on the BBC, following her 1974 re-election:

In 1975, at the Conservative Party conference:

"Let me give you my vision: a man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the State as servant and not as master. They are the essence of a free economy and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend."

Her prayer upon her first arrival at No. 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister:

Her speech at the 1980 Conservative Party Conference: "You turn if you want to; the lady's not for turning." Thatcher spoke words we should heed 32 years later:

If spending money like water was the answer to our country's problems, we would have no problems now. If ever a nation has spent, spent, spent and spent again, ours has. Today that dream is over. All of that money has got us nowhere but it still has to come from somewhere. Those who urge us to relax the squeeze, to spend yet more money indiscriminately in the belief that it will help the unemployed and the small businessman are not being kind or compassionate or caring.

They are not the friends of the unemployed or the small business. They are asking us to do again the very thing that caused the problems in the first place. We have made this point repeatedly.

Here's her final appearance at Prime Minister's Questions, November 22, 1990, just after the Europhiles in her own party carried out their coup:

In 2004, Thatcher's tribute to President Ronald Reagan, whose life she called "providential":

Others prophesied the decline of the West. He inspired America and its allies with renewed faith in their mission of freedom.

Others saw only limits to growth. He transformed a stagnant economy into an engine of opportunity.

Others hoped, at best, for an uneasy cohabitation with the Soviet Union. He won the Cold War, not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their fortress and turning them into friends.

I cannot imagine how any diplomat or any dramatist could improve on his words to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva summit. "Let me tell you why it is we distrust you." Those words are candid and tough, and they cannot have been easy to hear. But they are also a clear invitation to a new beginning and a new relationship that would be rooted in trust.

We live today in the world that Ronald Reagan began to reshape with those words. It is a very different world, with different challenges and new dangers. All in all, however, it is one of greater freedom and prosperity, one more hopeful than the world he inherited on becoming president.