For most of the past 30 years Peter Taylor has been the outstanding British reporter covering Northern Ireland. Where others have moved on to greener journalistic pastures, he has stayed, fascinated by this latest phase of the imbroglio that is Irish history, and determined, often in the face of considerable British government hostility, to uncover the truth of its darker corners.
Brits is a journalist's account, with all the strengths and weaknesses that description implies. Like his earlier volumes -Provos and Loyalists - it is a book based on a television series about the principal actors in the Northern conflict.
As one has come to expect from Taylor, the research is meticulous, the key players all feature prominently, and the history, as far as one can be sure at this still very recent remove, is accurate and balanced. As a first class investigative journalist, Taylor is particularly strong on the undercover element of the British security forces' war against the IRA.
His main discovery this time is the role played by the British army's 14 Intelligence Company - known as the Detachment or "Det" - in that ruthless, largely hidden struggle.
This small group of tough and extraordinarily brave "on the ground" operators - men and women - bugged IRA weapons and explosives so that they could be tracked; broke into republican houses to hide listening devices; carried out close surveillance of terrorist suspects; set up ambushes; and carried out killings of leading IRA men that were often attributed to the SAS.
As part of their training to withstand interrogation, they were even subjected to some of the notorious "five techniques" - including sleep deprivation and "white noise" - used by the British against selected internees in 1971. Despite the peace process, the "Det", like the IRA, has not gone away - it is still "very, very busy", says one former operator.
Taylor has also talked at length to Frank Steele and Michael Oatley, the two senior M16 agents used by the British to keep lines open to the IRA from the 1970s to the 1990s. One senses a reluctant admiration in the comments of these highly intelligent men for the present republican leadership.
In 1972, Steele regarded Gerry Adams as a person with "a terrific future ahead because of his qualities". When Taylor visited him shortly before his death in the late 1990s, he asked the journalist to pass on his congratulations to Martin McGuinness "on becoming a statesman".
Oatley believes it is not sensible to press the IRA to decommission as part of the present stage of the peace process. He thinks it would have little practical effect on reducing the risk of renewed violence, since new weapons can always be obtained; the demand for it is provocative because it makes more difficult the task of those republican leaders who want to persuade their colleagues to abandon terrorism in favour of politics; and it is selective because it takes the pressure off the more undisciplined loyalist paramilitaries. "Every step the IRA takes along the political path surrenders a measure of its capacity for violence. That is progress enough."
However, Taylor also understands the fiendishly difficult balance that is needed to keep the Unionists on board. He follows the Oatley interview by quoting John Major on the difficulties of asking Unionists to sit down at a table "with people who had an armalite and a bomb underneath the table which, if the talks got to a sticky phase, they would then take out and use."
The role of British intelligence and undercover elements in convincing the IRA leadership that they could not win a united Ireland by military means alone is a central theme. When Brendan Hughes, former Belfast Brigade commander and hunger-strike leader, came out of jail in the mid-1980s, he saw the problems the British were causing by the numbers of informers they ran and the sophisticated technology at their command.
"I think prominent IRA people came to the conclusion that the British military regime could not be defeated, and there had to be negotiations," he says.
People also forget just how close the IRA had come to losing the "war" 10 years earlier, before the abortive 1975-76 ceasefire. Hughes's predecessor as Belfast commander, Billy McKee, recalls discussing calling off their campaign with the organisation's legendary "hard man", Seamus Twomey, at that time. The weaknesses in this book are the forgivable ones of too much material having to be condensed into too few pages, leading to a certain dryness of style caused by the requirement to list and order and abbreviate. This inevitably means a loss of some of the horror of 30 years of low level civil war, although when he does touch on human tragedy, such as the 1976 murders of the Reavey sons in South Armagh and the retaliatory massacre of 11 Protestant textile workers, Taylor is a careful and sensitive chronicler.
Peter Taylor is one of those journalists - perhaps a rare species - who has always had a double sense of obligation: to the Irish people he is reporting, to accurately and sympathetically explain their often irreconcilable viewpoints; and to the British television viewers he is serving, to make a difficult, often boring, yet important story amenable to understanding.
Over the long years of the conflict, he has used his superb journalistic skills to illuminate the complexity of Northern Ireland, and in the process has played his own part in helping to move us towards the more hopeful era we are now living through. It is not many journalists who can say that. We on this side of the Irish Sea also owe him a debt of gratitude.
Andy Pollak is director of the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh. He is on leave of absence from his job as a journalist in The Irish Times.