She had the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe. So said French President Francois Mitterrand, the last serious socialist to lead a major European nation, speaking of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who helped bury socialism as a doctrine of governance.

She had the smooth, cold surface of a porcelain figurine, but her decisiveness made her the most formidable woman in 20th-century politics, and England's most formidable woman since its greatest sovereign, Elizabeth I. The Argentine junta learned of her decisiveness when it seized the Falklands. The British, too, learned. A Tory member of Parliament said, "She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag."

She aimed to be the moral equivalent of military trauma, shaking her nation into vigor through rigor. As stable societies mature, they resemble long-simmering stews — viscous and lumpy with organizations resistant to change and hence inimical to dynamism. Her program was sound money, laissez faire, social fluidity and upward mobility through self-reliance and other "vigorous virtues." She is the only prime minister whose name came to denote a doctrine — Thatcherism. ("Churchillian" denotes not a political philosophy but a leadership style.)