Belfast: for 30 years a byword for bombings and bitterness. It is a small city which has achieved international notoriety for the inventiveness of its citizens in their pursuit of killing each other; it's the town that brought you the car bomb and the Shankill Butchers.
Yes, but as the Northern Ireland Tourist Board might say, there is so much more. Effectively, Belfast has become four fractured cities as a result of the troubles. There is West Belfast. The upper-case W is important as it denotes an independent republic within the city - as opposed to west Belfast, the geographical area which includes nationalist and unionist districts. Then there is east Belfast, true blue for the most part and industrial; north Belfast, mixed, and south Belfast, a sort of sanctuary due to the big houses of the middle classes and the influence of the university.
Pick any resident from any area and they will tell you how special their own locale is and, more importantly, how decent the people are. Decency is the gold standard of human commerce in Belfast. No greater compliment can be paid to another than to say: "He's a decent fellow." (I'll leave it to the political scientists and philosophers to work out how such decent people committed and endured such savagery for so long.)
Jonathan Bardon's Belfast: A Century reminds the reader that while the city has always had its troubles, it is a single identifiable, knowable entity. It is a city which its citizens have always felt proud of and, while there is always the danger of slipping into short-sighted parochialism of the native - isn't it a great wee place - there is a lot to be proud of.
Mapping the city from the beginning of the 20th century, Bardon (with the aid of researchers Wendy Dunbar and Hilary Bell) packs images of 10 decades into individual chapters which simultaneously define the era and provide continuity in the narrative. There are pictures of brutal poverty and civic well-being and achievement, of youngsters and oul dolls, of bomb-ravaged Belfast during the second World War and the relative decadence of the 1950s and early 1960s.
Many will identify with the images and add their own stories about places long since vanished. Most importantly, Bardon lets the pictures do the talking, providing only the briefest of introductions to each of the decades.
It is strange, too, how the smaller pictures sometimes have the most impact. I found myself staring at a picture of John DeLorean, manufacturer of a sports car who set up business in the 1980s. While DeLorean wears a smile of satisfaction (no doubt the result of huge grants from the British government) others will remember the desperate expectation of so many people who hoped for jobs in his Shangri-la factory. Unfortunately, the jobs were short-lived. Let us hope that Belfast's march towards becoming a city once again is not.
Pol O Muiri is an Irish Times journalist