Creating a climate of fear

At the outset of this rich, dense and polemical primer on the modern history of political violence Michael Burleigh has the good sense to define his terms. He describes terrorism as ‘a tactic primarily used by non-state actors, who can be an acephalous entity as well as a hierarchical organisation, to create a climate of fear in order to compensate for the legitimate political power they do not possess’. A phrase that recurs is ‘propaganda by the deed’, and he adds: ‘that modern states … have been responsible for the most lethal instances of terrorism … is taken as a given’.

Burleigh doesn’t seek to be comprehensive — South America and indigenous south- east Asian terrorism are largely omitted — but he is impressively wide-ranging. Starting with the 19th-century Fenians, he moves east to round up the anarchists, nihilists and revolutionaries (and drunks and madmen) we glimpse in Dostoevsky and Conrad.