Structurally, there are a few lapses. For whatever reasons, footnotes have been eschewed - even though there is often no other way of confirming the source of certain quotations. If it reduced costs (and the book is very good value) it must be recognised that it also reduced standards of scholarship. Additionally, we are not told, for instance, if the leader column's move to the inside pages was a Thompson innovation or something which happened at another time. Sayers is not placed into context as an editor as effectively as he might have been if a comparison with his counterparts on the Irish Times, Irish  News and Liverpool Echo  had been made (to be fair, Gailey does mention the Glasgow Herald in passing). On page eight  - and this hardly seems worth mentioning - 'a just war' appears as 'just a war'. And, sometimes, Gailey's summaries of evidence are almost indistinguishable from the evidence itself, to the extent that on page 105 he actually quotes from the excerpt in summarising it. Furthermore, his evident admiration for Sayers occasionally leads him into territory which is not, on the face of it, very important:

At the end of June he saw Australia beat England by one wicket at Lords, and there was always time to hear Myra Hess at the National Gallery and for a new interest in opera and ballet. In October 1944 he heard Menuhin play in the Albert Hall, and the following month saw Gielgud's Hamlet at the Haymarket and Fonteyn dance Giselle. Then in the new year he went with Tyrone Guthrie to a performance of Uncle Vanya.

Compare that to this wonderfully lucid remark: 'the televising of the Derry riots had not only served as the signal for the "Catholic revolt", but had also ensured the final collapse of Protestant deference'. Comments such as this locate the evidence right at the centre of events, where it casts light on everything: unfortunately, it is more usual in this study to find Gailey explaining events in a manner which casts light on the evidence. It is a sorry matter, and one which we can hope to see rectified as others now (with luck) begin to draw on it as an extremely valuable source of insights into twentieth century constructive unionism.

James Loughlin, a lecturer at Magee College, faced an identical problem in locating his study within a body of work, but found a different solution: he just ignored the problem. Like Gailey's, his work appears to exist as an alternative to, rather than component part of, the history of Northern Ireland. That said, it is full of meticulous research and first-rate interpretation which must, surely, now stimulate debate on unionism within its own UK context.

Beginning with a section on the role of objectivity in history and its implications for