One has to admit, Roger Ebert, Margaret Thatcher and Annette Funnicello make rather an odd threesome (but then, so did John Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley). I don’t have much to say about any of them. Ebert was the guy who told us whether movies were worth the money and hassle to see in the theater (when he started, that usually meant “see them at all.” Now it’s just a temporal judgement). Funnicello meant nothing at all to anyone born after 1960 or so.

And Thatcher? Thatcher is the Last Lioness, one presumes. I don’t know much about her. I was dimly aware of her existence as a child. I remember her mostly in the absence when “Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher” was replaced by “Prime Minister John Major” on radio and television. It stuck in the ear the first few times, just as when “Reagan administration” became “Bush administration” the previous year; the first “end of an era” I remember.

She was a totem to conservatives and progressives alike, a creature of admiration and of hate for much the same reason: she had no fear. She understood that history favors leaders. The rest is commentary.