evidence: The then prime minister ascribed the vast majority of Troubles murders to the IRA, he said. "I thought: ‘That’s not right, it’s nowhere near that.’ It just stuck in my mind at the time." His subsequent research – and work by other scholars – attributed about half of all the Troubles’ deaths to the Provisional IRA. [...] And so, in 1984, he began a remarkable solo effort to document every death in the Troubles – every victim’s name, age and status, who killed them, where, and how. Sutton filled gaping holes in official statistics by gathering facts about one killing, then another, and another, the task stretching backwards and forwards in time, spanning decades, an epic chronicle of more than 3,500 lives lost. [...] Sutton’s index stops at 2001, several years after republican and loyalist groups renounced violence. It records a total of 3,532 deaths – children, mothers, soldiers, police, paramilitaries, tourists, farmers, teachers, politicians, milkmen, on and on. The result is a monolith of unassailable facts: a record of lives extinguished that stands impervious to revisionist winds, to efforts by republicans, unionists and others to shape their own narrative of the Troubles.