Summary: an elegantly written but blunt introduction to the politics of the British border in Ireland, and the threats to peace that British blundering poses

This is a very short book. Doubtless a historian of the calibre of Diarmaid Ferriter could have written a considerably longer one. But with a short book there is the hope, however forlorn, that at least some English people might deign to read it.

Because as this book elegantly demonstrates, it is English ignorance of Ireland that has, in the aftermath of Brexit, done so much to threaten Ireland’s fragile peace.

Margaret Thatcher once infamously stated that Northern Ireland was as British as her own constituency, Finchley. This was, of course, nonsense, as this book shows, and, as Ferriter also shows, something she herself did not even believe. It was only when its particularities and differences within the UK were finally publicly recognised by the British government, that a constitutional settlement could be hammered out, within the context of Ireland and the UK’s common membership fo the European Union, which effectively removed the contentious border in Ireland. This new settlement encompassed, in John Hume’s words, the “totality of the relationships” – within Northern Ireland, between north and south, and between Britain and Ireland. This was then enshrined in an international treaty: the Good Friday Agreement.

With Brexit, and Theresa May’s reliance on the far Right to maintain her premiership, the imperial nostalgists in the Conservative Party and the Protestant Supremacists of the Democratic Unionist Party, who always opposed the Good Friday Agreement, have seized upon this as an opportunity to wreck it. Theresa May herself, never a fan of the rule of international law, has been happy to be steered by their atavistic will into the frontiers of unlawful behaviour, threatening to renege on the UK’s commitments under the Good Friday Agreement, as she seeks to satisfy their fantastical demands.

I’m writing this the morning after the senseless murder of a young journalist, Lyra McKee, on the streets of Derry. Dangerous passions have already been stirred up by British incompetence. But we can be confident this tragedy will not encroach on the consciences of Boris or Stanley Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, David Davis, self-styled “Brexit hardman” Steve Baker, disgraced former Defence Secretary Liam Fox, or neo-fascist leader Nigel Farage. For them the lives and hopes of the Irish are of no consequence. They will never be bothered to read even this short book.

But any English person who dreams of their country being something more than an intolerant vassal of the United States, should read this. Those who are ignorant of history are already blundering into its bloody repetition.