The Senecans: Four Men and Margaret Thatcher

The Senecans: Four Men and Margaret Thatcher

by Peter Stothard
The Senecans: Four Men and Margaret Thatcher

The Senecans: Four Men and Margaret Thatcher

by Peter Stothard

eBook

$13.49  $17.99 Save 25% Current price is $13.49, Original price is $17.99. You Save 25%.

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers

LEND ME® See Details

Overview

“This unconventional account of the Margaret Thatcher years by a former editor of the Times . . . mixes reminiscence, gossip, and classical philosophy.” —The New Yorker

A year after the death of Margaret Thatcher, a young historian arrives to ask Peter Stothard, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and former editor of the Times, some sharp questions about his memories of the Thatcher era. During the interview the offices from where he long observed British politics are being systematically flattened by wrecking balls. From the dust and destruction of a collapsing newspaper plant emerge portraits of the Senecans, four of the men who made the Thatcher court so different from that of her successors. As well as love of Britain’s first female Prime Minister they shared strange Latin lessons in a crumbling riverside bar. They took their name from their taste for the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a pioneer writer from Cordoba in Roman Spain, a philosopher, courtier and acquirer of massive wealth from the age of the Emperor Nero. Blending memoir with ancient and modern politics in the manner of his acclaimed diaries, Spartacus Road and Alexandria, Peter Stothard sheds a sideways light on Margaret Thatcher’s “believing age.” In finally identifying his interviewer he also answers questions about his own literary and political journey.

“[An] artful blend of truth and fiction . . . Stothard’s poetically written, supremely stylish memoir only partly conceals its underlying mission, to insist that antiquity still has urgent things to tell us.” —Emily Gowers, The Guardian

“This thoughtful and unexpectedly moving memoir . . . brilliantly captures the excitement of the Thatcher years.” —Richard Aldous, The Wall Street Journal

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781468313437
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc.
Publication date: 09/01/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 254
File size: 4 MB

About the Author

Peter Stothard is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement and author of Alexandria and The Spartacus Road. From 1992 to 2002 he was the Editor of The Times. In 2012 he was chairman of the judges for the Man Booker Prize.

Table of Contents

September, 2014 1

Escape to Cordoba

Thatcher and other broken promises

Memoirs, dogs and lampposts

A Believing Age

April, 2014 7

Miss R comes to Wapping

Margaret sideways

A tomb by the Thames

Ronnie, Woodrow, Frank and David Hart

May 45

Doomed walls

Ronnie Millar's piano

Remains of Molotovs

Seaside balsa palaces

In the Falklands War

Gotchal

June 89

Falling glass

D.H. Lawrence in the Miners' Strike

How I was Woodrowed

Frank Johnson and the penis on the roof

July 115

Four ghosts return

Frank Finds the skip

Latin at The Old Rose

Gorbachev and the Gunpowder Plot

Maggie, Out, Out, Out!

August 189

When Wapping dies

Woodrow Wyatt in the Locarno Room

Poems by a Prime Minister

Cool Britannia

Seneca's last bath

September 265

Cordoba, three weeks on

Deaths and letters

Who Miss R was

The Senecans' farewells

Escaped parrots 265

Acknowledgements 275

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews