Art, chosen by Laura Cumming
Treatment Room (1983)
In Richard Hamilton's installation, Thatcher administered her own harsh medicine from a video above the operating table with the viewer as helpless patient: a case of kill or cure.
Taking Stock (1984)
Hans Haacke portrayed Thatcher enthroned, nose in the air like a gun-dog, surrounded by images of Queen Victoria, the Saatchi brothers and, ominously, Pandora. Caused national furore.
In the Sleep of Reason (1982)
Mark Wallinger edited Thatcher's 1982 Falklands speech from blink to blink, fading to black in between, emphasising her solipsistic tendency to close her eyes when speaking as if nobody else existed.
The Battle of Orgreave (2001)
Jeremy Deller's restaged the worst conflict of the miners' strike from multiple viewpoints, uniting two strands of British culture – trade unionism and civil war re-enactment – in an act of catharsis.
For the Love of God (2007)
Damien Hirst's career – Thatcherism applied to art – reached self-parody with this skull, calculating material value against aesthetic worth: £15m for the jewels, £50m for the Hirst.
Film, chosen by Philip French
For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Director John Glen has Roger Moore's Bond, who has recovered a top-secret naval device, being congratulated by the PM (Janet Brown), phoning from the kitchen at No 10 with Denis Thatcher beside her, G&T in hand.
The Ploughman's Lunch (1983)
Director Richard Eyre and writer Ian McEwan anatomise and anathematise Thatcher's Britain with Jonathan Pryce as a BBC producer writing a revisionist history of the Suez affair while the Falklands war proceeds.
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)
Thatcher created Channel 4, which produced some of the major films attacking her regime – most memorably this Stephen Frears satirical fable, scripted by Hanif Kureishi, about immigrant entrepreneurs in divided Britain.
Riff-Raff (1991)
Ken Loach has been Thatcher's foremost cinematic antagonist. In this angry comedy he turns a non-union London building site (a former hospital being remodelled as luxury flats) into a potent image for Thatcher's Britain.
The Iron Lady (2011)
There's Richard Attenborough's Young Winston, and The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918), but Meryl Streep's uncanny portrayal of Thatcher (directed by Phyllida Lloyd) is the only substantial biopic of a 20th-century PM.
Music, chosen by Kitty Empire
Tramp the Dirt Down by Elvis Costello
Political pop was not born in 1979. But it received an almighty fillip with the Thatcher era, allowing everyone from Billy Bragg to Wham! to rally around loathing of one of the most hated figures of modern times.
Common People by Pulp
The Eighties were a golden age for musicians, with squatters' rights and these state-funded arts-grants-by-proxy, allowing bands such as Pulp to live on the dole or go to art college and create.
Supersonic by Oasis
Thatcher's efforts to reduce unemployment gave rise to the enterprise allowance scheme – a £40 a week handout that helped kickstart labels such as Alan McGee's Creation Records.
Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead by the cast of The Wizard of Oz
At the time of writing, the song is in the Top 10 and heading north, thanks to a Facebook campaign to get the Wizard of Oz song to No 1 by the time you read this.
Spice Up Your Life by The Spice Girls
The Spice Girls encapsulated the legacy of rampant individualism of the Thatcher era: sing about pish, sell the lie that fame is the apex of human endeavour, and hijack feminism with an ersatz analogue.
Books, chosen by Robert McCrum
What a Carve Up ! by Jonathan Coe (1994)
The finest English satire from the 80s. The "carve up" concerns the UK, and the novel is a memorable and explicit commentary on Thatcherism, a topic that many other novelists shrank from.
One of Us by Hugo Young (1989)
The book that first nailed Thatcher and Thatcherism. It's avowedly interim and partisan but it has one unique virtue: it was written from the frontline of Thatcher's assault on British life.
Diaries: Volume I by Alan Clark (1993)
Clark was a shrewd and waspish observer, as a junior minister, of life at the top of the greasy pole. His account of Thatcher's fall, barely 100 pages, is a masterpiece of reportage.
Money by Martin Amis (1984)
The English novel that most completely captured the Age of Maggie. Its sardonic and even romantic brilliance now gives it the dislocated grandeur of a baroque statue on a municipal dump.
GB84 by David Peace (2004)
Visceral, enraged, ambitious: this 2004 novel explores the 1984 miner's strike as an English civil war. Addresses a moment of contemporary politics head-on. Bloody, engrossing stuff.
Television, Chosen by Euan Ferguson
Death on the Rock made by Thames
Exposed the lack of warning given by the SAS before they shot dead three (unarmed) IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988. Thatcher was furious with the production company, Thames.
Yes, Prime Minister by Lynn & Jay
Supposedly her favourite programme, she famously "wrote" (it was really by Bernard Ingham) and appeared (woefully) in a 1984 sketch – about which co-writer Jonathan Lynn is rather angry.
Angry northern dramatists
Alan Bleasdale (Boys from the Blackstuff, GBH), and later Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott, gave us much of the era's most brilliant drama, born of the north-south divide.
A Very British Coup by Alan Plater
The 1988 TV adaptation of Chris Mullin's novel had the splendid late Ray McAnally as a working-class Labour PM, in 1989, vowing to remove all American military bases and end media monopolies.
The Tube Channel 4
Rude, mouthy, unmanageable, fun, fuelled from top to bottom by cocaine – this early Channel 4 show shivered the tailfeathers of the right and encapsulated the mid-1980s.
Satire, chosen by Andrew Rawnsley
Spitting Image created by Fluck & Law
Invariably brutal and usually very vulgar sketches performed by puppets, a suitable response to the divisive Thatcher era. The ridicule was highly aggressive and often just as effective.
Dear Bill in Private Eye
The fictional letters penned by a gin-sozzled Denis Thatcher to his friend and golfing partner portrayed both husband and cabinet as cowering in fear of the wrath of "the Boss".
Julian Critchley
Many of the rudest things were said by her own side. The wittiest of those was this Tory wet, MP for Aldershot and friend of Michael Heseltine. Nicknamed her "the great she-elephant".
Loadsamoney created by Harry Enfield
Thatcherism provoked many leftie comedians to become ranty. Their lame heckling just pinged off her armour plating. An exception was Enfield's obnoxious Cockney boasting about the size of his wad.
Citizen Smith by John Sullivan
Starred Robert Lindsay as "Wolfie" Smith, self-proclaimed leader of the revolutionary Tooting Popular Front. It said something acute about the hopelessness of the left during her reign.
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