The Almost Impossible Ally: Harold Macmillan and Charles De Gaulle

click here for more details, find new or used items	Peter Mangold Our price £13.20 (£20.00) New from £10.40 Used from £8.64 Pages: 272 (Hardcover) ISBN: 1850438005 Pub: I B Tauris & Co Ltd Pub date: 2006-02-02 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 474605

Reader Reviews:

Superb work of diplomatic and political history (1/2 people found this helpful)

Mangold has produced a very informative and engaging account of how the lives and times of these two fascinating political statesman intertwined in the years both during and after WWII. It is generally a fascinating read, and gives a superb account of the many issues and events - nuclear armaments, relations with the US administration, the development of the economic integration process within Europe, and Britain's ill-fated EEC application from 1961-63 - over which the two men both confronted and conversed in sustained bouts of high-level politics. Mangold's researches in the archives are extensive and his command of the source material is assured.
If you like a complex mix of both political and diplomatic history, then this work on two complex and contrasting personalities is highly recommended. It also, with a deft touch, places these two statesman within the wider domestic and international contexts which shaped their respective nations' foreign policy interests and conceptions of their regional or global obligations and commitments. In its own way is also stands as a nuanced and informative treatment of broader Anglo-French relations in this period. As a whole, this book is not too "scholarly" to repel the general reader but for those reading from an academic standpoint the usual scholarly apparatus is provided, with endnotes and a full bibliography of both primary and secondary sources, again reinforcing the impression that the evidence on which this book is based has been handled with great care and attention.

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