Crying in the Wilderness. Jack Sayers: A Liberal Editor in Ulster, 1939-69. By Andrew Gailey. Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1995. Pp. xii + 175; £16.50 hb. ISBN 0 85389 540 6.

Ulster Unionism and British National Identity Since 1885. By James Loughlin. London: Pinter, 1995. Pp. ix + 257; £40 hb. ISBN 0 816187 845 0.

Here are two books which, in their different ways, show what happens when young scholars come up against the teflon-coated armour plating of the old guard. Irish history, including that section of it which is also British history, is monocular to an extent which is, at times, astonishing: one thinks, for instance, of the remarkable decision of Helen Burke to write her history of pre-partition  poverty with sole regard to the territory of the present Republic of Ireland. By neglecting an area which was part of the territory, Burke showed the extent to which the 'Troubles' have occupied a nine-tenths portion of the collective historical consciousness - the other tenth being represented by Gailey and Loughlin. Louis MacNeice might have been pleased to have his poetry chanted by this vanguard:

Time and place - our bridgeheads into reality
But also its concealment! Out of the sea
We land on the Particular and lose
All other possible bird's-eye views, the Truth
That is of Itself for Itself - but not for me.

The merest glance at most work on Ireland and Northern Ireland would confirm the impression that man, apparently, just clambered out of the sea and straight onto the holy ground, from whence, henceforth, only the view from Dublin would prevail. The fact that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a large section of the island's people have developed a sense of history based on 1690 and the United Kingdom, rather than 1916 and the Republic, has made little impact on many writers: instead, unionism has suffered the indignity of being set up, in the main, as a test of the Whig notion of betterment in history, this being defined as an ending of partition rather than the maintenance of cultural values and financial status within the United Kingdom. Their success in defying the tide of history - for which even Canute would have doffed his crown - is seldom, if ever, seen as the creation of a separate lineage with historical value in its own right.

What, then, when two young scholars attempt to locate unionism within its own con