Death to Order: Professor Simon Ball on his new book

The study of assassination is akin to running a razor blade down the history of international politics: the cut is narrow but long and deep. Assassination reveals statesmen and their servants at their most authentically vulnerable moments – they are, after all, often the people with the most to lose. Assassination: personal, violent, widely reported, strips back layers of self-deception like few other acts.

The changes assassination wrought in democracies were subtle but identifiable in the archives. Less surprisingly, one must always acknowledge that available evidence on assassination is both complex and fractured and needs to be unravelled with care.

Edith Durham, the indefatigable investigator of Sarajevo, 1914. She feared the fate of Cassandra but was vindicated in many of her conclusions. The Brotherton Library holds an important part of her correspondence. 

Modern assassination is fundamentally a phenomenon related to states. That is not to say that states were always behind assassination – although they sometimes were – but rather that the reaction of states, and particularly great powers, to assassination has given modern political murder its potent charge.