First published in her pioneering treatise Statecraft, the opinions and projections of the former Prime Minister on Europe remain potent and resoundingly prophetic.

Margaret Thatcher foresaw the European Union as a swelling superstate, gradually eroding Britain's freedom. Irreparable and doomed, European integration did not allow for the birthright of nationhood. It was the most recent incarnation of an idea that has been tried many times before, and the outcomes were far from happy. "During my lifetime," she says, "most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or other, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it."