Moreover, some readers may be unsettled by his scrupulous even-handedness in detailing the motives and actions of terrorists and those attempting to save lives by thwarting them. He is ambivalent about two of his main characters. One is Gerry Adams, the calculating president of Sinn Féin, the Ira’s political wing: a brooding, manipulative presence who is the epitome of strategic patience. The other is Thatcher herself, who refused to be pressured by hunger strikers in the Maze prison into granting IRA inmates “special category status”. Ten of them died. This, above all, made the ira seek revenge against a woman they saw as a cruel and implacable foe. The author draws on his decades long experience as a seasoned journalist covering war torn countries and nonstate violent actors to weave the story. Less than three months later IRA bombs targeting Falklands veterans killed 11 soldiers in London’s Hyde Park and Regent’s Park on the same day. And just over two years after that, Mrs Thatcher narrowly escaped death when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, demolishing the bathroom of her first-floor suite, killing five people close to her and seriously injuring 33 others. It was a moment when “history pirouetted”, writes Dubliner Rory Carroll, Ireland correspondent of the Guardian newspaper, in this extraordinary account of how the IRA planned the Brighton bombing, who the bomber was and how he was caught.

The unknown things like No. 10 is like a Tardis or Maggie cooked own food. And all time you wonder how meny Roman Catholics would have died if IRA had killed Thatcher? Killing Thatcher is the gripping account of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Margaret Thatcher and to wiping out the British Cabinet - an extraordinary assassination attempt linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles and the most daring conspiracy against the Crown since the Gunpowder Plot. For any British or Irish writer to remain un-partisan about the Troubles in Northern Ireland is a tough ask but Carroll shows sympathy and respect for all sides of the conflict in this masterful and compelling account of a remarkable episode in the Modern History of both countries.Later, the 1981 hunger strikes are described as the “animating force” that led to the Provisional IRA actively seeking revenge against the Prime Minister. 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.” This book is so very well written, incredibly interesting & keeps you engaged all the way through. The author writes very well. I was no fan of ‘Maggie’ but whatever your views of her she did have a democratic right to be PM, at least under the election laws of our great UK. So although no Tory supporter I thought the bombing of the Brighton hotel was an affront to democracy and she (along with the others at the hotel that night) certainly didn’t deserve being bombed or targeted in such a manner.

In this fascinating and compelling book, veteran journalist Rory Carroll retraces the road to the infamous Brighton bombing in 1984 - an incident that shaped the political landscape in the UK for decades to come. He begins with the infamous execution of Lord Mountbatten in 1979 - for which the IRA took full responsibility - before tracing the rise of Margaret Thatcher, her response to the 'Troubles' in Ireland and the chain of events that culminated in the hunger strikes of 1981 and the death of 10 republican prisoners, including Bobby Sands. From that moment on Thatcher became an enemy of the IRA - and the organisation swore revenge. Lord Mountbatten was obviously high profile but was also a very soft target. There was some suspicion that the IRA felt somewhat upstaged by the INLA who assassinated (Conservative MP) Airey Neave at Westminster in 1979.” Much like the Assassination of Kennedy or the 9-11 bombing, it was an event you remember where you where when you were told or found out. I remember being woken by my father on the morning of 12th October to be told the IRA had made an attempt to blow up the Conservative Goverment during their 1984 conference by planting a huge bomb the Grand Hotel Brighton. Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe.

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In 1984, the IRA killed five people and came dangerously close to assassinating then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - and yet this disaster has gone mostly undiscussed in recent years. In this book, Carroll brings together the long chain of events which led up to the bombing, and unravels the complicated investigation that followed. The IRA bomb exploded at 2:54 a.m. on October 12, 1984, the last day of the Conservative Party Conference in the coastal town of Brighton, England. Rooms were obliterated, dozens of people wounded, five people killed. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in the lounge of her suite preparing her keynote speech when the explosion occurred; had she been just a few feet in another direction, flying tiles and masonry might have sliced her to ribbons. As it was, she survived--and history changed. In not providing the proper context for Magee’s actions, Carroll fails his readers by giving the impression The Troubles could be boiled down to “good vs. evil.” In actuality, both the IRA and the British government have apologized for their actions on numerous occasions. Not only does a one-sided depiction not provide the full story of The Troubles, but it is dangerous. To avoid future conflicts, in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, we must properly understand what drives someone to plant a bomb or torture a prisoner. Only with a thorough understanding of others’ reasonings can we prevent violence. Carroll’s account fails in this, as it misleads its readership into thinking there are “good guys” (Thatcher) and there are “bad guys” (Magee). Through that lens, humans will continue to misunderstand each other, and conflict will follow. The book is marketed as ‘a blend of true crime and political history’. Most true crime writing takes crimes that are obscure or opaque and uses them to illustrate wider points about the society in which they took place. There was, though, never much mystery about the Brighton bomb. Many understood what had happened as soon as they heard the bang. Magee was eventually arrested and convicted but he was released from prison after the Good Friday Agreement. He wrote a book and spoke freely about what he had done – he once lectured to undergraduates in my own department. Carroll has conducted over a hundred interviews but he does not really have much to add to what we already know about the Northern Ireland Troubles. At times, his account is padded with banal detail. 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’. One sometimes senses that an author desperate to reach his daily quota of words is raising his eyes to heaven: ‘an azure sky unfurled over the Atlantic’; ‘the sun hung in a cloudless sky over London’; ‘a patch of sky [was] paling over the Palace Pier.’