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BOOKS: Where generals dared to tread NEW IN PAPERBACK:Financial Times; Apr 13, 2002. By LUDOVIC HUNTER TILNEY

BOOKS: Where generals dared to tread NEW IN PAPERBACK:Financial Times; Apr 13, 2002 By LUDOVIC HUNTER TILNEY

In the UK there's a tendency to present the Falklands War as Britannia's last solo curtain call on the imperial stage, to be booed or applauded accordingly. Scant mention is made of Argentina, the country that launched the full-scale occupation of the islands 20 years ago this month. Yet the conflict can't be understood without considering its context in Argentine history, as Jimmy Burns does in his revised and updated The Land That Lost Its Heroes (Bloomsbury Pounds 9.99, 544 pages).

Burns, an FT journalist, was the paper's correspondent in Buenos Aires from 1982 to 1986. Early in his posting he witnessed an elderly woman being clubbed by armed police during the first major demonstration against the military government which had ruled Argentina since 1976. Three days later the invasion of the Falklands was announced, and many Argentines who had earlier filled the streets protesting re-emerged waving flags and celebrating. "Behind the effervescent nationalism and self-congratulatory jingoism, however, there was little real patriotism," he writes. The Falklands landgrab was engineered by a regime desperate to shore up support in a country it had brought to the point of moral, economic and political collapse.

Argentine claims to sovereignty of the Falklands date back to a brief settlement there in the 1820s. The issue was revived as "a galvanising force of foreign policy" by the nationalist leader General Juan Peron in 1945, in the face of implacable British inactivity. The UK refused to discuss sovereignty over the islands, but also refused to spend the money needed to defend them; later, this obstinate neglect would be compounded by diplomatic bungles.

The militarised nature of Argentine society should have been enough to alert British officials. "This is a country formed by Generals, liberated by Generals, led by Generals and today claimed by Generals," Peron once said, and he was an elected leader. This militaristic tradition led in 1976 to the seizure of power by a military junta comprised of the heads of the army (the most powerful), the navy (the most conservative) and