Winning the Cold War

John O’Sullivan has done much more with this book than provide three potted biographies; he has laid out a compelling account of how the Cold War was won, furnished us with a manual of political leadership and told us the inner secrets of a love story.

At the heart of this story of the Eighties, a decade O’Sullivan rightly champions, is the remarkable relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The strength of their bond was at the time regarded as semi-scandalous, a betrayal by the British Prime Minister of her first loyalty, to her country, in favour of a wild ideological fling.

For those of us who were undergraduates when both were in power one of the trials of university life was finding one particular poster in all too many student bedrooms. It depicted Reagan as Rhett Butler and Thatcher as Scarlett O’Hara above the words, ‘She promised to follow him to the end of the earth, he promised to arrange it.’