Those whose notions of the Irish past have been gleaned from ballad, song and An Phoblacht, those for whom "revisionism" is just another word for shoneenism - all will find much to hate in this book. For Elliott's close rereadings of many of the episodes and themes in Irish history often rub up uncomfortably against traditionally accepted views. The fact stubbornly remains, and this book seeks to qualify rather than deny it, that Northern Catholics were indeed oppressed and that the chief agent of that oppression was the unlovely creed of political Protestantism or Orangeism. Elliott has, however, drained off much of the scummy bathwater of nationalist popular historiography - for which the infant can surely only be healthier.