Margaret Thatcher was the woman who began the shift to the right that has affected almost all the countries of the West in the past three decades. She died in London on Monday at the age of 87, 34 years after she became Britain's first female prime minister and 23 years after she was driven from office. But it is an open question whether even the financial crash of 2008 and the ensuing prolonged recession have finally ended the long reign of her ideas in Western politics.

"This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated," wrote some minion in the personnel department of British chemical giant ICI, rejecting young Margaret Roberts' application for a job as research chemist in 1948. She was fresh out of Oxford University, 23 years old, brimming with self-confidence, and absolutely full of opinions. She probably frightened the job interviewer half to death.

But she landed a job with a plastics company in Colchester in 1949. She joined the Conservative Party and stood for Parliament in the 1950 election (she was the youngest candidate ever), and married businessman Denis Thatcher in 1951. Margaret Thatcher, as she then became, finally made it into Parliament in the 1959 election.