Tin Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman

by Raymond Briggs

Blurb

The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman is a 1984 picture book, ostensibly for very young children, written and illustrated by Raymond Briggs and published by Hamish Hamilton. It satirises the Falklands War.
The book presents the story of the war in the format of a picture book for young children. It is written in a simple style with large, brightly coloured illustrations. Neither the Falkland Islands, the belligerent countries, nor their leaders are named in the text. Instead, the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the Argentine dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri are presented as a pair of metal monsters who send men to fight over a "sad little island" populated by a few shepherds who eat nothing but mutton. The old woman derives from Thatcher's nickname "the Iron Lady", while the General derives from the slang term "tin-pot general" or "tin-pot dictator", meaning a petty authoritarian type.
The book mentions several ways in which soldiers were killed or maimed; the pictures accompanying these parts of the text are monochrome pencil sketches, as opposed to the full-colour caricatures in the rest of the book.

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