British prime minister Margaret Thatcher looking pensive at the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool.

A combination of repulsion at the conduct of British soldiers in Belfast, grievance at the sectarian state, and sheer boredom seems to have led him into a life of ‘armed struggle’, as the IRA termed its campaign. Two people, never traced, joined him in the hotel for lunch and probably gave him the bomb components. Magee did everything possible to complete the mission and, to the greatest extent, to cover his tracks. Her acceptance of ‘police primacy’ informed her intransigence during the IRA hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981, making her the IRA’s prime target.

When he was home secretary in the mid-1960s, Roy Jenkins suggested that the uniformed policeman who was detailed to stand outside his door might come inside and make himself useful as a part-time footman. Even more fascinating is that a mere 14 years after this, the Good Friday Agreement was signed, essentially bringing the 'troubles' to an end and the Brighton bomber was released by the British Government as part of it. British intelligence agents would later nickname him “the Chancer” such was his willingness to undertake clandestine operations that others in the movement thought reckless and foolhardy.

The author details the lead up to, and the aftermath, of the Brighton bombing of 1984, where a serving British Prime Minister was very nearly assassinated. Magee and his comrades described the high-security units in which they were imprisoned as ‘submarines’, because they were so cut off from contact with the outside world. He looks at the origins of the Troubles and the difficult background of Magee himself, who was largely brought up in England.We are told twice that down the corridor from the room in which Magee was setting the bomb, a guest was paying a photographer ‘to take erotic portraits of his female companion’. Within six months the IRA had assassinated Lord Louis Mountbatten with a bomb that exploded as his boat exited Mullughmore harbour in Co Sligo. For want of two minutes, or a few feet, history could have turned, and with it the fate of Northern Ireland, Thatcherism, and the Cold War”.