Scan barcode
A review by siria
Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown by Rory Carroll
dark
informative
tense
3.75
Reading Killing Thatcher brought home to me just how much has changed on this island in the quarter century since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, and also just how determined the Brits were to fuck it all up again by voting for Brexit. Cheery!
Anyway, Rory Carroll here produces a fairly tightly focused, journalistic account of the notorious Brighton Bombing in 1984 and the lead-up to it. If Margaret Thatcher—then Tory PM of the U.K., and like her contemporary Ronald Reagan the architect of an awful lot of modern economic and social suffering—had spent a minute or two longer in the bathroom of her hotel suite, she would have been more directly caught in the blast and might well have been killed. Carroll mostly eschews the "what ifs" of the scenario, and only occasionally speculates about the things that are still unknown. (How much did Gerry Adams know in advance, and how much did he greenlight.) He focuses instead on the players involved, the event itself, and the investigative aftermath. Carroll is at his best in describing the brutal horror of the explosion and the destruction it wrought.
Anyway, Rory Carroll here produces a fairly tightly focused, journalistic account of the notorious Brighton Bombing in 1984 and the lead-up to it. If Margaret Thatcher—then Tory PM of the U.K., and like her contemporary Ronald Reagan the architect of an awful lot of modern economic and social suffering—had spent a minute or two longer in the bathroom of her hotel suite, she would have been more directly caught in the blast and might well have been killed. Carroll mostly eschews the "what ifs" of the scenario, and only occasionally speculates about the things that are still unknown. (How much did Gerry Adams know in advance, and how much did he greenlight.) He focuses instead on the players involved, the event itself, and the investigative aftermath. Carroll is at his best in describing the brutal horror of the explosion and the destruction it wrought.