He notes, in the understated tone that characterises the book, the revelation that struck Magee 16 years later when Berry’s daughter Joanne asked to meet him: “for the first time [he] perceived Anthony Berry as something other than a Tory. Others in Thatcher’s extended retinue, who had gathered for the Conservatives’ annual conference, were not so lucky. One sometimes senses that an author desperate to reach his daily quota of words is raising his eyes to heaven: ‘an azure sky unfurled over the Atlantic’; ‘the sun hung in a cloudless sky over London’; ‘a patch of sky [was] paling over the Palace Pier. They help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site.

Then, later, following the Harrod’s bombing at Christmas 1983, Gurney had to sift through the wreckage. The bomb also fractured irreparably the bond between Thatcher and her closest cabinet colleague (and, at the time, most likely successor), Norman Tebbitt. A real example of how a seemingly unsolvable problem can be solved if there is enough will on both sides. In this fascinating and compelling book, veteran journalist Rory Carroll retraces the road to the infamous Brighton bombing in 1984 – an incident that shaped the political landscape in the UK for decades to come. In this fascinating and compelling book, veteran journalist Rory Carroll retraces the road to the infamous Brighton bombing in 1984 – an incident that shaped the political landscape in the UK for decades to come.I wasn't expecting such a review of the history of the Ireland troubles, but thoroughly enjoyed that and learnt a lot - didn't realise how much I didn't know! Given the subject matter, perhaps ‘enjoyed’ is not the correct word to use - but certainly engaging and beyond interesting. One intriguing question echoes throughout Carroll’s book: what would have ensued had the IRA succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher on that fateful night?

In 2013 his first book, COMANDANTE: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela (Penguin Press and Canongate) was published. In the meantime, this book should be read far and wide and particularly by anybody who was not around in those darkest days of human waste. But what about the “unlucky” people that the IRA’s bomber Patrick Magee actually killed, maimed or bereaved or permanently disabled? The army wanted to crush the IRA militarily, but the RUC chief constable Kenneth Newman persuaded her that the policy of ‘Ulsterisation’ and ‘criminalisation’ of IRA captives was working.Overhearing her bodyguards and aides fretting about getting her safely and quickly back to London she told them: “I do not mind where you take me but there is one clear instruction. Within six months the IRA had assassinated Lord Louis Mountbatten with a bomb that exploded as his boat exited Mullughmore harbour in Co Sligo. Almost four thousand rubbish bins were used to take the wreckage of the hotel away for examination by forensic scientists.

He begins with the infamous execution of Lord Mountbatten in 1979 – for which the IRA took full responsibility – before tracing the rise of Margaret Thatcher, her response to the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland and the chain of events that culminated in the hunger strikes of 1981 and the death of 10 republican prisoners, including Bobby Sands. For the most part, though, he concentrates on the period after 1979 – the year in which Thatcher was elected and the IRA assassinated Lord Mountbatten (a great-grandson of Queen Victoria who had been viceroy of India) with a bomb placed on his fishing boat, which also killed three other people, two of them children.Of the three principal players, it is Magee who emerges as the most enigmatic, unknowable character, a drifter whose life was given form by adherence to a single defining cause. She came to power in 1979, a few months after her confidant, Airy Neave, had been killed when a bomb exploded under his car in the House of Commons. Neither, as Carroll points out in this outstanding book, have any of the 30-or-so people who helped Magee to plan, manufacture and plant the bomb that came within metres of murdering Mrs Thatcher when she was “the most powerful woman in the world”. Magee’s ability to slip unnoticed in and out of England, despite being on the radar of British security forces, brought him inevitably to the Grand hotel on the morning of Saturday 15 September 1984. Thatcher’s personal conduct, even to her many enemies, was remarkable: she seemed neither shaken nor stirred.

Rory has had a long and highly successful career as a foreign correspondent reporting from Belfast in the 1990s, London, Baghdad during and after the American invasion, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Los Angeles. This may seem crushingly obvious, but has to be emphasised because the great drama of the event lay in what did not happen. The members of the IRA gang that fired that rocket, and a second mortar bomb, from a Ford Transit van parked in nearby Whitehall on February 7th, 1991, have never been identified or apprehended. He was murdered by the Irish National Liberation Army, but Thatcher, understandably, saw little difference between the two organisations. Carroll interviewed more than a hundred former IRA members, police detectives, bomb disposal experts, politicians, officials and friends and relatives of key players for this book.Her very first comments were to apologise for being Irish and advising me if this was upsetting me, she would get one of her colleagues to do the work,” McClean said. As an English guy who would only have been 5 years old when this happened, I think it is so important to understand what was happening in Northern Ireland, and the mainland, during the 'troubles'. Even as a young child and teenager in London during the 80s and 90s IRA bombs were part and parcel of life, a thing that might at worst kill you and at best disrupt your travel plans. What appeared to be a victory for Maggie turned out to be the biggest boost the Republican movement could ever have wanted.