Changing all utterly

This is a book so remarkable that after finishing it you will find yourself casting the film that will surely get made. Kevin Myers, a young freelance Irish journalist — James Nesbitt, he of the Yellow Pages and Pontius Pilate; Pastor Oliver Cromwell Whiteside, a Protestant fundamentalist preacher who speaks throughout in the accents of the American South — Strother Martin ; assorted IRA and UVF men, their randy wives and girlfriends — the entire repertory cast of the Carry On films. For Myers, whose memoir this is, has succeeded in something you would have thought impossible. He has reduced the Northern Irish Troubles to murderous black farce while convincing you this is how it really was.

Not as visiting British journalists or television teams saw these events from the cocktail lounge of the Europa hotel, with the fishnet buttocks of the waitresses wobbling to and fro. And certainly not as American and Southern Irish journalists, brought up on phrases like ‘a terrible beauty’, saw them.