Whatever else Mrs Thatcher did for British culture, it's impossible to deny the legacy she left Britain's novelists. Who could fail to appreciate the battle for the nation's soul that played out on her watch? Left versus right, north versus south, miners versus police: these elemental oppositions provided a robust framework on which to hang a story. The lady, and the era she presided over, was for turning - if only into fiction.

For the state-of-the-nation novel, Thatcher offered the biggest boost since Dickens. This type of fiction, with its epic sweep, feeds on the energy of a society undergoing radical transformation. It thrives on well-defined winners and losers, good guys and bad guys. And Thatcher's Britain offered both. Long after she had departed Downing Street, the Thatcher years and their fall-out continued to provide a scratching post for writers as diverse as Amanda Craig ( A Vicious Circle , 1996), Jonathan Coe ( The Rotters' Club , 2001) and Alan Hollinghurst ( The Line of Beauty , 2004).