SOURCE: Laird, Nicholas. “The Poet's Ulcer.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5179 (5 July 2002): 5-7.

In the following review, Laird offers a negative assessment of The Invasion Handbook, which he judges to be “a welter of misplaced aggression and blame.”

Tom Paulin is an angry man. Like most converts, he has a zealous disposition. His opinions have frequently caused offence, most recently when he is alleged to have told an Egyptian newspaper that “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers in Israel “should be shot dead”, and on the BBC's Late Review when he said that British Paratroopers present at Bloody Sunday were “thugs sent in by public schoolboys to kill innocent people. They were racist bastards.” There is little vatic about Paulin. Fivemiletown, his 1987 volume, was a remarkable book that married his obsession with the vernacular (both Northern Irish and American) and the political in a shocking, brilliant manner: full of hard, gaudy fragments...