Killing as entertainment

‘The history of our love affair with violence’ is how Michael Newton describes his new book, Age of Assassins. In fact, its scope is much narrower: assassination in Europe and the US from the murder of Lincoln in 1865 to the attempt on Reagan’s life in 1981. So, no Gandhi, no Allende, none of the killings carried out in the name of militant Islam. Even some of the assassinations within the author’s time frame are not considered – Olof Palme’s, for example, or the murders in Italy’s anni piombi in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Newton’s central argument is that in the period covered assassination became less about political causes and more about the deed itself; and the framework of the book is essentially chronological. He discusses first the tradition of the ‘good’ assassin or tyrannicide (von Stauffenberg, who attempted to kill Hitler, is a modern example), then examines the ‘heroic’ age of European assassination in 1865-1883, when anarchists motivated by the idea of ‘propaganda by the deed’ murdered a number of establishment figures ‒ Tsar Alexander II being the most celebrated.