The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

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You can surprise a person with affinity, I thought, and then say, ''Where's the lav?'' Not a Windsor expression. It wasn't really a question, either. The flat was so small that its layout was obvious. He took his weapon with him. I listened to him urinate. Run a tap. I heard splashing. I heard him come out, zipping his trousers. His face was red where he'd been towelling it. He sat down hard on the folding chair. There was a bleat from the fragile canework. He said, ''You've got a number written on your arm.''

This short story is bitterly funny, and is at much a paean to grotty accommodation as it is to the struggles of writing. She notes that: With the introduction of a disabled girl, "diminutive and crooked", working at the B&B, the story begins to show signs of more complicated authorial intent. There are suggestions of a subliminal affinity between the narrator and the girl, and eventually Mantel forces an unlikely series of events that make this resonance between them cumbersomely explicit. It diminishes the impact of an otherwise powerful piece. G7 Summit in Williamsburg, Virginia, 1983: (from left) Pierre Trudeau, Gaston Thorn, Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterrand, Ronald Reagan, Nakasone Yasuhiro, Margaret Thatcher, and Amintore Fanfani. (more) The badly damaged Grand hotel in Brighton after an IRA bomb exploded in the building during the 1984 Conservative party conference. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images Of course, Mantel’s charmed powers of suggestion won’t be news to fans of her longer fiction, especially readers of her best-selling, Man Booker Prize-winning historical novels set in Tudor England, “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” Over the past decade or two, Mantel has made a name for herself — no other way to put it — as one of the indispensable writers of fiction in English. (Even the creakier royals have twigged on it: In the U.K., Mantel is officially Dame Hilary now, having been granted birthday honors earlier this year.)Writing short stories has provided Mantel with a break from Cromwell, although she said she expected to complete The Mirror and the Light, the third instalment of her trilogy, next year. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies won the Man Booker prize in 2009 and 2012 respectively. And in the title story, a chilling, fable-like “counterfactual” set in 1983 — in which a sniper plans to assassinate Margaret Thatcher from a window as she leaves a private hospital where she’s just had eye surgery (the real Thatcher did have exactly such surgery in 1983, but died of natural causes in 2013) — it will be hard for younger non-Brits to work out why references to Thatcher’s “handbag” can still sound so noirishly hilarious, or why the nameless assassin’s contemptuous mention of the way the Iron Lady “toddles” about in public should so immediately and ghoulishly conjure the lady, in all her steely, handbag-gripping, lower-middle-class glory. Thatcher’s main antagonist in Carroll’s narrative, though, is a different sort of operator: Gerry Adams, who was the head of Sinn Féin from 1983 until 2018. To this day, Adams denies that he was ever a member of the I.R.A., let alone complicit in any violent act, although he is widely known to have been a street-level commander and is believed to have sat on its governing Army Council. In later years, he developed an avuncular image; he, too, claimed to adore Teddy bears. Adams is often described as mysterious—Carroll calls him “sphinxlike”—but the puzzle is not whether he has lied about his past. It is about what he was really up to, and, as with the bombing campaign itself, what his lying has yielded. John Major replaced Margaret Thatcher after she announced her resignation as Conservative Party leader and prime minister on November 22, 1990. As long as the war was kept in that context, they could sustain the years of attrition. But in the early 1980s we succeeded in destroying both strategies. The hunger strike destroyed the notion of criminalisation and the Brighton bombing destroyed the notion of containment [...] After Brighton, anything was possible and the British for the first time began to look very differently at us; even the IRA itself, I believe, began to fully accept the priority of the campaign in England. [24]

Within this preoccupation with the past, the collection covers a lot of ground: anorexia, car accidents and rape all feature. Infidelity is explored in two short stories – one at the beginning of an affair (‘I meant to ask her to be French’ the protagonist exclaims), and one at the end (‘it’s a long time now since he was subject to urges of the flesh’). Stephen Day, a Conservative party member and future MP, described feeling the hotel crashing down from directly above him. a b c d e David Hughes (11 October 2009). "Brighton bombing: Daily Telegraph journalist recalls". The Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 25 December 2011 . Retrieved 13 May 2011.She added: "She imitated masculine qualities to the extent that she had to get herself a good war. The Falklands was great stuff – limited casualties, little impact on the home front and great visual propaganda. I am not suggesting this was conscious. After the Labour Government's defeat in the House of Commons on a vote of no confidence on 28 March 1979, a general election was called in the United Kingdom, and with the Conservatives expected to win the election, Neave, as the party's Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was set to become the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, which would place him in a position of governmental executive authority to bring his military strategy for the province into fruition. Off with her head? Sue Townsend imagined the Royal Family in a council house in The Queen and I. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle / Rex Features Look at me and [classics professor] Mary Beard, and all the other women whose arguments are not engaged with or are dismissed because of fixations with appearance."