The ultimate

the long version

In *The Ultimate* (1976), written under the pen name James Lund, Stonehouse described an IRA mortar attack on a cabinet meeting at Number Ten. The similarities between his story and what actually happened in February 1991 when John Major’s cabinet was nearly blown up by a mortar fired from a vehicle in Whitehall are so uncanny that one can’t help wondering if someone in the IRA had read *The Ultimate* and taken the idea from there. - Owen Bennett-Jones. (2022, April 21). [The Thief and the Trousers](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n08/owen-bennett-jones/the-thief-and-the-trousers). *London Review of Books*, *44*(8).