PhilipJohnston.com :: Books :: Northern Ireland and the Troubles

*Fiction titles appear in italics*
The Armed Forces
Armed Forces - General
Low Intensity operations Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping	Brigadier Frank Kitson	A study in understanding and combatting revolutionary warfare, drawing on Kitson's colonial experiences, often cited by republicans as a source of British Army attitudes to Northern Ireland in the 1970s	X
Army
A Breed of Heroes	Alan Judd	Early 1980s account of the life of ordinary soldiers in the routine and diverse soldiering in Northern Ireland	X
UK Special Forces / Operations
Big Boys' Rules The SAS and the Secret Struggle against the IRA	Mark Urban	A detailed analysis of the intelligence war and the use of special forces by a democracy fighting terrorism	XX
*Journeyman Tailor*	Gerrald Seymour	Fictional, but highly regarded, account of multi-agency special operations in Northern Ireland	X X
The Operators - Inside 14 Intelligence Company (The Army's top secret elite)	James Rennie	Interesting account of training for covert anti-terrorist operations in Northern Ireland, although loses pace towards the end	X
Intelligence
Intelligence - Armed Forces
The Dirty War	Martin Dillon	An in-depth examination of the covert war between the British intelligence and military machinery and the republicans at their dirtiest.
Northern Ireland
Republican Movement
INLA Deadly Divisions	Jack Holland, Henry McDonald	A history of the smaller republican terrorist movement from creation in 1975 to the late 1980s	X
Killer in Clowntown Joe Doherty, the IRA and the Special Relationship	Martin Dillon	An account of a famous IRA escapee who fought extradition from the US to the UK, almost a biography with lots of background detail on the IRA	X X
The Provisional IRA	Patrick Bishop & Eamon Mallie	A 1987 history and analysis of the roots and development of the core of the republican movement written by two of the top Ulster experts	X
The Secret Army - The IRA 1916 - 1979	J. Bowyer Bell	Interesting history of the republican movement focussing on the period preceding the current phase of the Troubles	X X
The Trouble with Guns: republican strategy and the provisional IRA	Malachi O’Doherty		X X
Loyalism
The Shankill Butchers A case study of mass murder	Martin Dillon	An account of the most infamous loyalist murder squad of the 1970s led by Lenny Murphy who carried out one of the most brutal series of murders in British legal history. An interesting insight into loyalist thinking.	X
Tourism and General History
The North from the Air	Elser Crawford	Blackstaff Press come up trumps again with this great book dedicated to aerial photography of Northern Ireland. A coffee table must! One of my favourites.	XX

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