It’s a time for long books. I’m halfway through War and Peace. Hilary Mantel’s latest is next, an act of literary devotion which requires that I put aside her anti-Catholic polemicising. No such doubt attaches to the third and final volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Lady Thatcher. The prose glitters with the author’s diffident sagacity. It made me wonder how our first female prime minister, a chemist by training, would have brought her scientific method to bear on the problem of coronavirus. A sympathetic reading of her life will never satisfy some. Roaming near St Paul’s with a camera crew, I was astonished by the venom of a small minority who had gathered to ‘‘celebrate’’ Baroness Thatcher’s death on the day of her funeral seven years ago. One man, I would say in his late fifties, kept shouting “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – dead, dead, dead.” He didn’t care that he was being filmed. And so I didn’t agonise about how people – perhaps including his employer – might feel about this display. My late wife, though incapable of such crass tribal hatred, always went slightly doolally at the mention of Mrs T. She was partly cured by listening to Moore answer questions about the first volume of his Thatcher trilogy at the Chalke Valley History Festival. Had she been alive to read the final instalment, in particular the deft way Moore handles the pathos of Lady Thatcher’s twilight years, her knee might have stopped jerking altogether.