The Little Platoon: Diplomacy and the Falklands Dispute [Hardcover]

Michael Charlton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1989

On the morning of 3 April 1982, when Parliament hastily assembled in response to the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands. The previous day the Librarian of the House of Lords placed on the reading tables, photocopies of Samuel Johnson's pamphlet concerning the Falklands in 1770 - the first time Britain prepared to fight over the islands. "The Little Platoon" based on Michael Charlton's radio series of the same name, traces the long history of Falklands diplomacy through interviews with those directly involved in the decades of diplomatic exchanges which preceded the war - former heads and other senior officials at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, the successive Foreign Secretaries and other British Ministers together with their counterparts in the USA, Argentina and the United Nations, and the admirals. The testimony of such distinguished figures as Alexander Haig, Francis Pym, Costa Mendez, Caspar Weinberger, John Nott, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Perez de Cuellar makes the book a source for the diplomatic background to the most controversial episode of recent British history.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

When he went to work for the British Foreign Office, Ted Rowlands was told that his task was to look after the "dots" on the map. Some of those dots, the Falklands Islands, proved to be such an intractable diplomatic problem that in 1982 the British and the Argentines went to war over them. This oral history is the transcript of a BBC-TV series in which participants discussed the history of the diplomacy leading up to that war. The result is no dry-as-dust history but an absolutely fascinating and absorbing account of the interplay of politics and human nature. There is now a small collection of literature on the Falklands war, including Peter Lord Carrington's Reflecting on Things Past (Harper, 1989). Whether the episode was a Greek tragedy, as one participant describes it, is an open question, but this account will help readers decide for themselves.
- H. Steck, SUNY Coll. at Cortland
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Blackwell Pub (November 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631165649
• ISBN-13: 978-0631165644
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,269,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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