You could let me slip downstairs just before. I'll take a shopping bag. If nobody sees me go, I'll say I was out the whole time. But make sure to force my door, won't you? Like a break-in?'' I want the reader to see her as a human figure, she’s not just some icon with a halo of hair and a stern voice. She was also a human being and a politician.” Magee was an experienced bomber – a meticulous “operator” in IRA parlance – and could do a convincing English accent. Yet his choice of pseudonym risked it all because there was the real Roy Walsh – a fellow Provo from Belfast well known to English authorities. Walsh had been caught with the rest of an IRA team in 1973 after setting off two car bombs in London. The story has already proved controversial, with the Daily Telegraph this week pulling out of a deal to publish the story first, despite reportedly paying tens of thousands of pounds – a figure denied by the Telegraph – to secure exclusive rights.

I was insulting him, and I meant to. For those of tender years, I should explain that polytechnics were institutes of higher education, for the young who missed university entrance: for those who were bright enough to say affinity, but still wore cheap nylon coats. The surreal experience is the inspiration for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: August 6th 1983, published exclusively on Friday. The badly damaged Grand hotel in Brighton after an IRA bomb exploded in the building during the 1984 Conservative party conference. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images I’m not shooting her because she doesn’t like the opera. Or because you don’t care for – what in sod’s name do you call it? – her accessories. It’s not about her handbag. It’s not about her hairdo.”I heard his long, smoker's cough. ''Oh, right, the tea,'' I said. ''But you know another thing? They may have been blind at the end, but their eyes were open when they went into it. You can't force pity from a government like hers. Why would she negotiate? Why would you expect it? What's a dozen Irishmen to them? What's a hundred? All those people, they're capital punishers. They pretend to be modern, but leave them to themselves and they'd gouge eyes out in the public squares.'' One of the central principles of the Good Friday Agreement is that there is no single way to be Irish. It was treated as a turning point when the 2021 Northern Ireland census showed, for the first time, that more people had been brought up in Catholic than in Protestant households, but a fair number said that they weren’t religious at all. And the percentage of Catholics in the Republic has fallen to seventy-eight, a number that includes many whose first language is Polish or Portuguese. The I.R.A., for that matter, was never as Catholic, in a religious sense, as its martyrology might suggest, in part because it also had a Marxist streak. Today, Sinn Féin is the largest party in the North, and one of the largest in the Republic, not because of its militancy but because of its Bernie Sanders-like social program. Mary Lou McDonald, who succeeded Adams as the Party’s leader, has a decent chance of becoming the next Taoiseach, or Prime Minister.

Mantel said there were parallels between Thatcher and Thomas Cromwell, her main writing obsession, in that both were self made. Thatcher, though, hated the end result. The aftermath of the IRA bombing at the Grand Hotel, Brighton, on October 12 1984. Picture: PA Wire. Within this preoccupation with the past, the collection covers a lot of ground: anorexia, car accidents and rape all feature. Infidelity is explored in two short stories – one at the beginning of an affair (‘I meant to ask her to be French’ the protagonist exclaims), and one at the end (‘it’s a long time now since he was subject to urges of the flesh’).The houses on the right-hand side of Trinity Place – I mean, on the right-hand side as you face out of town – have large gardens, each now shared between three or four tenants. In the early 1980s, England had not succumbed to the smell of burning. The carbonised reek of the weekend barbecue was unknown, except in the riverside gin palaces of Maidenhead and Bray. Our gardens, though immaculately kept, saw little footfall; there were no children in the street, just young couples who had yet to breed and older couples who might, at most, open a door to let an evening party spill out on to a terrace. Through warm afternoons the lawns baked unattended, and cats curled snoozing in the crumbling topsoil of stone urns. In autumn, leaf-heaps composted themselves on sunken patios, and were shovelled up by irritated owners of basement flats. The winter rains soaked the shrubberies, with no one there to see. The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party, Brian Hanley and Scott Millar, ISBN 1-84488-120-2