Margaret Thatcher’s Copy: Her Best-Loved and Most-Quoted Poet
KIPLING, Rudyard.
The Seven Seas. London, Methuen, 1896.
8vo, pp. [xviii], 230; title printed in red and black, woodcut title vignette; a fine copy, top edge gilt but otherwise uncut, bound by the Guild of Women Binders in beige morocco gilt, sides finely panelled with fillets and geometrical stylized floral corner-pieces, flat spine lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers; lower corners a little rubbed, upper corners very slightly bumped.
One of 150 copies printed on handmade paper of the first English edition of Kipling’s anthology; this copy from the library of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Her biographers concur in singling out Kipling as her best-loved poet, and not just on the grounds of her many assertions. In the Summer of 1976, having been chosen as leader of the Conservative party and having since happily adopted the soubriquet of Iron lady devised for her by the Soviet Defence Ministry, Thatcher selected for her holiday reading Kipling’s poems, and during that Summer she read them all. She was fond of quoting Kipling, both in her speeches, which are peppered with citations from numerous poems, and in her dedication inscriptions.
Stewart 140.