In this week’s TLS – a note from the Editor

Not far behind the pall-bearers at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral have come the publishers and writers. The military have now departed and the literary have taken their place, less colourfully and a little less obediently too. It would be wrong to say that books played a great part in the life of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. While she enjoyed the company of supportive intellectuals in her Downing Street years, she also made clear, as Ferdinand Mount notes this week, that her ideas about her country were all formed when she was in her late teens. The current crop of assessments includes some decent works but will not be the end of the story-telling. Charles Moore has begun a “marvellous biography”, writes Mount, but his official chronicle has so far reached only as far as the Falklands War. The furthest rise and sharpest fall are yet to come.

While it would be impossible to write the history of post-war British politics without mentioning Margaret Thatcher, it would be perfectly possible, writes Matthew Sturgis, to do the same for art without a word on Rex Whistler. And yet the painter too had his own unique distinctions. The new study by Hugh and Mirabel Cecil creates a “rich and satisfying record” of a man who rose from modest beginnings, became a master of watercolour and drawing but painted much of his greatest work on theatre sets and little-seen walls. A man of rare talent and glamour, he died on his first day of war in Normandy in 1944. 

In Commentary this week we publish Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of a war incident which, as our contributor concedes, he had most certainly written and talked about many times before. But Adrian Bartlett’s version of the sinking of the Ayia Barbara in 1941 is taken from the full account that the author himself put down on paper for a local historian in Greek.

Tim Llewellyn reviews Andrew Finkel’s “lucid and informative” guide to Turkey, still a mysterious country to many and much needing lucidity at a time of sudden domestic protest and encroaching regional war.

Peter Stothard