the journalist John Lyttle, whose father Tommy ‘Tucker’ Lyttle was a big noise in the murderous Ulster Defence Association, evoked this brilliantly in 1996: ‘we were living inside the reports we saw on the television news, which had the odd, almost Brechtian effect of distancing you from things you might have actually participated in: a riot, for example. The result was a kind of documentary unreality. That, and a sort of vicious glamour which would increasingly loosen moral constraints and permit previously unimaginable behaviour. Men who traditionally read only thrillers, spy novels, war
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