text and to address historical themes within it? As MacNeice had it, the problem with having a different particular point of view is that the scholar must then present a truth which is, given the existent body of research, 'not for me'. The intellectual consequences of this are quite tangible: in his book, Andrew Gailey appears to abandon his role as interpreter of the evidence (reflecting, perhaps, the fact that there is little in print to associate it with); in the other, James Loughlin seems content, in effect, to let his very good study hang in space, his work seemingly unique until others choose to make it relevant.

Of these approaches, by far the less satisfying is the former. Gailey's book, which promised  so very much, is not so much a biography or 'a lively narrative of post-war Ulster' as a plea for consideration of another type of unionist. His subject, a liberal, tolerant and gentle man, the editor of Northern Ireland's most important newspaper in the crucial post-war years, seems so far removed from the popular image of unionism as to justify the claim to provide a 'unique perspective'. It is a shame, then, that the most important point of all - that Sayers and his type are/were as representative of unionism as Paisley - is not made with force: after all, if every study other than this 'unique' one is of the other type, then it may fairly be claimed that scholars have misrepresented a whole swathe of moderates in the past. Instead, Gailey provides a book which is disproportionately heavy on transcripts which imply this - with nothing actually being said.

Reading between the lines, it is possible to build up a fascinating and detailed insight into the life of one of these moderate unionists - and here we can thank the author for the painstaking research which he undertook. Sayers and his ilk were as much of the ruling class in Northern Ireland as the Churchills were in England; but it was homeland rather than Harrow that provided the common bond with his contemporaries. Sayers was clearly a British patriot, whose ship was sunk in September, 1939, with the loss of 518 of its 1260 crew (astonishingly, a debate at Stormont was interrupted to announce that Sayers had survived). Equally, he was an imperial romantic, as his recollection of the captain going down with the ship makes clear. He must have been intoxicated, then, with the thought of life in Churchill's map room, to which he was despatched thereafter. With his Northern Irish contemporaries, many of whom rose to the pinnacle of careers in, for instance, the RUC and BBC Northern Ireland, he pondered the rationale of using prepositions at the end of sentences while charting the movement of the convoys which had so nearly been the death of him. The odd mix of grand and parochial does much to explain Sayers' later life, for noone who returned to Belfast from the map room could have regarded himself as