Loved or loathed, she didn’t leave anyone without an opinion of her and of her policies. Here’s one:

Thatcher provided . . . a sustained, violent assault on British society launched on behalf of big business in the name of ‘strong government’ and cloaked in the rhetoric of national renewal.

That’s from Tom Mills at the New Left Project. Here’s another, from Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

What I remember best about her is that she pretty much invented the modern concept of the distracting Wanking Little War — the Falklands begat Grenada — and that she allowed an elected member of the British parliament named Bobby Sands to starve himself to death in a British prison rather than dress the way he wanted to dress, and that she once held this view about Nelson Mandela:

The Conservative prime minister had dismissed the ANC as “a typical terrorist organisation” and refused to back sanctions against the apartheid government, pursuing instead a policy of “constructive engagement”. South Africa was then seen as a vital ally in stemming communist expansion.

I’d forgotten that Bobby Sands died during her tenure, but I remember the Falklands and the gloating she did after she’d managed to expel the Argentinians from those little islands. Worse, as Charlie says, it emboldened Ronald Reagan and his advisers. She always was in favor of war; she once told George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War “look George, this is no time to go wobbly” when Bush was trying to decide what to do about an Iraqi tanker that was trying to break the naval sanctions against that country. And war is the only word that can be used to describe what she did to the National Union of Mineworkers in Britain in 1984-1985.

I was not a fan.