Books, Arts & Manners: A Provincial Childhood

Margaret Thatcher: The Path to Power (HarperCollins, 656 pp., $30)

MARGARET Thatcher’s father kept a grocer’s shop in Grantham, a market and railwayjunction town in the Midlands. Alfred Roberts was “a specialist grocer” selling sugar, coffee, biscuits, spices kept in “three rows of splendid mahogany spice drawers,” and smoked hams “in a cool back room.” The family lived above the shop, and Lady Thatcher remembers the aromas of coffee and bacon wafting upstairs. The childhood she recounts was, in her instructive phrase, “a provincial childhood.”

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Digby Anderson

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Margaret Thatcher

Britain

British Conservative Party

Margaret Thatcher: The Path to Power (HarperCollins, 656 pp., $30)

MARGARET Thatcher’s father kept a grocer’s shop in Grantham, a market and railwayjunction town in the Midlands. Alfred Roberts was “a specialist grocer” selling sugar, coffee, biscuits, spices kept in “three rows of splendid mahogany spice drawers,” and smoked hams “in a cool back room.” The family lived above the shop, and Lady Thatcher remembers the aromas of coffee and bacon wafting upstairs. The childhood she recounts was, in her instructive phrase, “a provincial childhood.”