Moving nimbly across thousands of years of historical territory that could scarcely be more fiercely contested, Ranelagh's authoritative account manages to be both dispassionate and highly readable. Now in its third edition since publication in 1983, the book includes a series of updated prefaces that are a reminder of the accelerating pace of events in recent times, and there is new material covering boom and bust, Troubles and peace, and the scandals, clerical and political, that have gradually emerged from the murk of silence and cover-up. Apart from a suspicion of the term "loyalist" (in inverted commas throughout) and the occasional glimpse of hostility to the hardliners on all sides who delayed movement towards progress in the North, the Short History is unusually free of an obvious agenda. Structured with exemplary clarity, it is especially lucid in its unravelling of the strands of motive and mischance that led to Partition, civil war and the divisions that for so long undermined the new State.
