These Divided Isles: Britain and Ireland, Past and Future, by Philip Stephens, Faber & Faber, 320 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0571381470 Philip Stephens’s These Divided Isles is bookended by what surely represents the high watermark of modern Anglo-Irish relations: Queen Elizabeth II’s 2011 state visit to Dublin. The event was widely hailed as symbolic of the normalisation of relations between the two states, to whose wider history its atmosphere of comity and good will stood in welcome relief. This is a history, in Stephens’s words, marked by ‘confusions, complexities and contradictions, as intimate and intertwined as it has so often been violent and traumatic’. Though not an academic historian, Stephens comes to the task of documenting these islands’ recent history with considerable bona fides. After graduating from Oxford with a degree in modern history, he went on to build a successful career as a journalist, and is now a contributing editor at the Financial Times, for which he writes a weekly column. His books include Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader, a well-received 2004 biography of the New Labour prime minister; Politics and the Pound: The Conservatives’ Struggles with Sterling (1996), a commanding portrayal of Tory governments’ recurrent battles with the national currency; and Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit (2021), a sharp account of Brexit and its roots. His years as a reporter and in the lobby have given him a ‘ringside seat’ and access to a variety of political and diplomatic insiders, among whom we could name Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff and lead negotiator in the Northern Ireland peace process; Daithí Ó Ceallaigh, a veteran diplomat and Ireland’s former ambassador to London; the...

In the third year of the reign of the Bablyonian king Belshazzar, the Book of Daniel tells us, the captive Jewish seer Daniel had a vision. A ram with two long horns dominated all the beasts around it and grew ever stronger. But a billy goat with a single massive horn came from the west and charged the ram with savage ferocity, breaking its horns and trampling it in the dust. ‘Then the goat grew exceedingly great; but at the height of its power, the great horn was broken, and in its place came up four prominent horns toward the four winds of heaven.’ Out of one of them grew a little tiny horn, which nevertheless increased in size until it threw down angels and stars, stopping all sacrifices and desecrating the temple. As Daniel was puzzling over all this random horniness, the angel Gabriel appeared to him. ‘Understand, O mortal, that the vision is for the time of the end,’ Gabriel told him. The ram, Gabriel explained, stood for the Persian empire, with its two horns symbolising the Medes and the Persians. (The Persians, who would quickly supplant the Medes as rulers of the new empire, got the longer of the two horns.) The goat from the west was the nation of the Greeks, who would overthrow the Persians; the goat’s single horn was their fierce king and the smaller horns his less powerful successors. The tiny horn symbolised ‘a king of bold countenance’ who would emerge and ‘destroy many and shall even rise up against the Prince of princes. But he shall be broken, and not by human hands ‘As for you,’ the angel concluded, ‘seal up...

My sister-in-law has been a lifelong fan of Sean Combs (Puff Daddy as was – Diddy if you will). In March 2024, the redoubtable icon of hip hop found himself, not for the first time, at the receiving end of some unwanted criminal justice attention. The scrolling public watched as searches were carried out in the various properties owned by him across the United States. When my sister-in-law saw the footage – aerial shots of police, guns drawn, pulling up in some mean-looking armoured vehicles – she expressed the view that surely whatever he was accused of must have been pretty damn serious. Why else the firepower? The only explanation was that Diddy was into some bad stuff and posed a serious risk to any law enforcement officer trying to bring him in. Now, as it turns out, many of the charges brought against him were pretty damn serious (the March raid was on foot of a federal sex trafficking investigation), but regardless of whatever Puff Daddy did or didn’t do (a sentence I never thought I would write), scholars of policing know that in the United States today persons suspected of even minor infractions can face a dawn raid. How did this happen, what does it have to do with Ireland, and how might a researcher’s identity play a role in the work they do? There is no such thing as overkill in American policing. Professor Julian Go breaks it to the reader in the opening sentence of his new book: ‘The militarization of policing is by now complete.’ In Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US, Go adds a final volume to...