Meredith Veldman – författare

Part of The World in A Life series, this brief, inexpensive text provides insight into the life of Margaret Thatcher. The second daughter of a provincial grocer, Margaret Roberts Thatcher was not born to privilege or power. She was not an original thinker; few of her teachers regarded her as particularly clever. What she did possess, however, was a remarkable physical constitution (she needed little sleep and was never ill), a phenomenal capacity for hard work, and a resolute ideological certainty allied with political adaptability and a populist sensibility. As one of the central founders of New Conservatism, Thatcher fought to shatter the post-World War II political consensus, the mainstream agreement that the central state must regulate national economic and social life in order to ensure full employment and the citizen's welfare from cradle to grave. Thatcher came of age when the postwar consensus was at its strongest. By the time she walked onto the world stage as leader of Britain's Conservative Party in 1975, however, the ideals of social citizenship forged in the tumult of World War II had begun to break down under the pressure of economic crisis. The resulting political confusion gave Thatcher the chance she needed. As prime minister of Britain from 1979 to 1990, she initiated the move of vast areas of the economy from public or state control to private ownership. More generally, Thatcherism both fed and fed upon a growing scepticism about state activism and governmental power--although, paradoxically, under Thatcher's guidance the power of Britain's central state grew, in some areas enormously.We live in a global age where big concepts like "globalization" often tempt us to forget the personal side of the past. The titles in The World in A Life series aim to revive these meaningful lives. Each one shows us what it was like to live on a world historical stage. Brief, inexpensive, and thematic, each book can be read in a week, fit within a wide range of curricula, and shed insight into a particular place or time. Four to six short primary sources at the end of each volume sharpen the reader's view of an individual's impact on world history.

The British Jesus focuses on the Jesus of the religious culture dominant in Britain from the 1850s through the 1950s, the popular Christian culture shared by not only church, kirk, and chapel goers, but also the growing numbers of Britons who rarely or only episodically entered a house of worship.An essay in intellectual as well as cultural history, this book illumines the interplay between and among British New Testament scholarship, institutional Christianity, and the wider Protestant culture. The scholars who mapped and led the uniquely British quest for the historical Jesus in the first half of the twentieth century were active participants in efforts to replace the popular image of “Jesus in a white nightie” with a stronger figure, and so, they hoped, to preserve Britain’s Christian identity. They failed. By exploring that failure, and more broadly, by examining the relations and exchanges between popular, artistic, and scholarly portrayals of Jesus, this book highlights the continuity and the conservatism of Britain’s popular Christianity through a century of religious and cultural transformation.Exploring depictions of Jesus from over more than one hundred years, this book is a crucial resource for scholars of British Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.