Feargal Cochrane. Belfast: The Story of a City and its People New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 320. $30.00 (cloth).

Feargal Cochrane is the author of several academic studies of the Northern Ireland conflict and its partial resolution in the so-called peace process.His new book, described as "a love letter of sorts" (xxi), is a more personal and loosely textured work.There are personal anecdotes, like the day in 1969 when the parents of the four-year old Feargal realized he could no longer be allowed to play outside with his beloved toy gun.Local references are glossed with mentions of Blackadder and Line of Duty.At times the rhetoric becomes positively fanciful: "if you grew up in Belfast during the 1970s or 1980s you were probably either a poet yourself, or you knew one who lived on your street" (19).But behind the informal tone lies a serious point.Irritated by outside observers who present the violence of recent years as the result of "some geographically specific psychosis" (2), Cochrane sets out to show instead that the violence of the last half century can be understood as a response to deep-rooted political, economic, and cultural forces.Cochrane's desire to substitute historical context for superficial labels is commendable.The problem is that, offering to lead the reader through the city's history, he is a less than reliable guide.The Irish Parliament did not, in 1720, decide unregistered Catholic priests should not be castrated, but instead branded on the face (55).Castration was proposed by the Irish privy council as an alternative to branding-quite probably as part of a complicated parliamentary maneuver-and neither penalty was ever enacted.Protestants of the Church of Ireland were not "in effect the landed gentry" (55).As the late A.C. Hepburn established many years ago, Anglicans in Belfast were on average less prosperous than Presbyterians, and on some measurements of economic status were closer to the city's disadvantaged Catholic population.The sacramental test prevented Presbyterians holding an office of trust or profit under the crown.It did not deny them the right to vote (57).The claim that Presbyterian religion and ecclesiastical organization predisposed its adherents to democracy, making them "innately individualistic and suspicious of group-think" (53) ignores recent studies of the rigid discipline exercised by the kirk session.Presbyterian church government, as Ian McBride has pointed out, is in fact best seen as oligarchic rather than egalitarian.The violent and explicitly anti-Catholic preaching of the Presbyterian clergyman "roaring" Hugh Hanna was anything but "what we would now refer to as a form of 'dog whistle' politics" (93).The opening of the Crumlin Road gaol in 1845 was indeed a response to the growth of the town's population (137).But it was also a consequence of an important landmark in Belfast's history, its replacement of Carrickfergus as the county town.These are specific points.But there is also a wider lack of understanding.Cochrane insists that Belfast's culture included a consistent radical strain.Dissent from authority, he says more than once, is in the city's DNA (53, 105, 125).His chapter on "The Radicalism," however,