The importance of truth

The words ‘Saville’ and ‘Inquiry’ have taken on a somewhat different meaning in recent weeks. But this is just to tell interested readers that my book on the original Saville Inquiry, Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and the Saville Inquiry is out now in paperback. If you can still find a bookshop then you might find it there. Otherwise it is of course available on Amazon etc. Priced at £12.99, it includes updated material on the recently-announced police investigation.

The book has been described by the Spectator magazine, no less, as ‘a real-life whodunit’, by the New Statesman as ‘compelling’, by the Literary Review as ‘indispensable’, by the Irish Independent as ‘riveting’, by Kevin Myers as ‘superb’. Several of my regular readers who have not read it, meanwhile, have described the very idea of me writing the book as ‘baffling’.

Quite a few people have asked me to explain why I wrote it. People tend to think that there are clear reasons why you write a particular book. I never find this. For instance many people hold the belief that people write biographies and histories of people or times that they admire. For my own part I do not think that is the case. I write books about subjects which interest me, and I hope will interest others, but the only thing I can discern that any of them have in common is that they all aim to correct some lie. The only time I have written a biography it was to correct what I thought was a mistaken historical impression. My book on neo-conservatism aimed to correct some then very prevalent myths about a particular political worldview. My book on Bloody Sunday tries, among other things, to correct the popular misunderstandings on all sides about an event covered in propaganda and counter-propaganda and simply aims to get to the very uncomfortable truth.