Sir John and Miranda Hoskyns
(2011)(A book in the Margaret Thatcher Interviews series)
A non fiction book by Claire Berlinski
In 2008, I published the first edition of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
I have never met Margaret Thatcher. By the time I wrote my book about her, she was already too ill to grant interviews. But I spent countless hours interviewing her colleagues, her friends, her enemies, and ordinary Britons who lived through her time in power. I recorded all of these interviews. In this series, I publish the complete, unedited transcripts of my interviews.
In the end, I had to choose which comments were worthy of inclusion in my book about her. It was a difficult decision: So many people had said so many things that seemed to me worthy of note. In the end, much of great interest wound up on the cutting room floor, but only because something had to go.
For those interested in Margaret Thatcher - or indeed, in the way biographers work - the transcripts of these interviews, unedited, may prove illuminating. Other historians may one day find them useful: Perhaps they illuminate points that I failed to grasp.
Sir John Hoskyns, the head of her policy unit, was the author of Stepping Stones--the blueprint for the Thatcher Revolution.
I met Sir John and his wife, Miranda, for lunch at the Travellers' Club, the oldest of the gentlemen's clubs on Pall Mall.
This is what we said to each other, without a single word edited, from the moment I switched on the recorder until the moment I switched it off.
I have never met Margaret Thatcher. By the time I wrote my book about her, she was already too ill to grant interviews. But I spent countless hours interviewing her colleagues, her friends, her enemies, and ordinary Britons who lived through her time in power. I recorded all of these interviews. In this series, I publish the complete, unedited transcripts of my interviews.
In the end, I had to choose which comments were worthy of inclusion in my book about her. It was a difficult decision: So many people had said so many things that seemed to me worthy of note. In the end, much of great interest wound up on the cutting room floor, but only because something had to go.
For those interested in Margaret Thatcher - or indeed, in the way biographers work - the transcripts of these interviews, unedited, may prove illuminating. Other historians may one day find them useful: Perhaps they illuminate points that I failed to grasp.
Sir John Hoskyns, the head of her policy unit, was the author of Stepping Stones--the blueprint for the Thatcher Revolution.
I met Sir John and his wife, Miranda, for lunch at the Travellers' Club, the oldest of the gentlemen's clubs on Pall Mall.
This is what we said to each other, without a single word edited, from the moment I switched on the recorder until the moment I switched it off.
Used availability for Claire Berlinski's Sir John and Miranda Hoskyns