This review is a combination of historical explanation and political argument. It was first published in 1975 with the object of thwarting the efforts of a group of British Foreign Office civil servants attached to the Northern Ireland office to create an "Ulster Nationalist" movement.

When no sign of an Ulster Nationalist movement manifested itself during the months following the Strike, the Secretary of State gave his civil servants the task of bringing it into being. "Against Ulster Nationalism" counterposed the sheer power of reason against the immense powers of patronage and persuasion commanded by the Northern Ireland Office. Its reasoning had considerable influence on the ground in Ulster among people of both communities, and the state-sponsored Ulster Nationalist movement never got off the Civil Service drawing board. Having been out of print as a pamphlet for more than a decade, it is now reissued in book form, both as a historical document in the double sense of including much historical material and of having played some part in history, and as a political argument which is still relevant because the long political vacuum in Northern Ireland has recently given rise to the spontaneous growth of some popularly based Ulster Nationalist sentiment.