Introduction: Politics, identity and change in contemporary loyalism

Enter any mainstream bookshop in Northern Ireland and the image of loyalism that confronts the browser is ostensibly one of criminality and individualism. Publishers of books on loyalism seem to take particular interest in acts of violence and murder perpetrated by those who gain reputations not so much for their thinking, but for their actions. Accounts of this behaviour, through dramatic emphasis on menace and brutality, mean such books tend to sit better on the shelves of crime fiction, rather than politics or social history.