POLITICAL VIOLENCE CREATES ITS OWN MOMENTUM NOT ONLY in the wider security community but also in that refuge for the voyeur, academic research. Before 1968 a mere handful of books looked at the Ulster problem. Since then more than two hundred books and several thousand articles have appreared. But to what avail? In a survey of this vast literature Professor John Whyte concludes that there has been a disproportion between the enormous effort expended and the exiguous results achieved. The purist might maintain that it is not the task of scholars to indulge in political engineering: to those of us who live in the benighted province any port in a storm will do. The merit of these five books is that, wittingly or not, they create some optimism simply because they shift our gaze from the depressing reality of Belfast and examine the problem in a wider context. Of course, that might not be their purpose. Bad Chubb set out with the modest task of explaining the political process of the Irish Republic for the benefit of his own students who had lacked an up-todate general work. Bew and Patterson took as their starting point ‘the irrepressible reality of the class conflict generated by the capitalist structure of the Irish economy’ (p. 187).