Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism

Creating a climate of fear

Michael Burleigh
HarperPress, 545pp, £25,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 20th February 2008

Sam Leith on Michael Burleigh's latest book

Burleigh is particularly entertaining when he lights on characters he holds in especial odium. His account of the loyalist paramilitary thug Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair — husband of ‘Mad Bitch’, father of ‘Mad Pup’ and, presumably, scourge of ‘Mad Postman’ — is full of rewarding detail.

Mad Dog, we hear, was a slow starter in the matter of murdering people and was originally known as ‘Wee Man’. In order to acquire the more flattering nickname he is now known by, he injected horse steroids into his arms and legs and ‘used the popular household aerosol furniture polish Mr Sheen to make his head shine’. While in jail in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement, Burleigh remarks, many paramilitaries ‘had reconfigured themselves into lawyers and sociologists, except those like Adair who were bent on a life of organised crime and hence concentrated on drugs and weight- lifting’. After his release, a provo attempted to shoot him in the back of the head at a UB40 concert: ‘the bullet merely bounced off the victim’s shaven head. Wounded, Adair fled the scene as “Red Red Wine” resounded.’

Few of the victims of violence in this book benefited to quite that extent from choosing the right brand of furniture polish. Leavened though it is by the occasional comic absurdity — the booby-trapped flag, the bowl of poisoned custard, the Islamist whose business card read ‘international terrorist’ — Burleigh has assembled a gruelling laundry-list of horror.

The FLN in Algeria cut off the lips of those who used alcohol and the noses of smokers, slashing the throats of repeat offenders — ‘a deliberate indignity otherwise inflicted on sheep’. In Kosovo we hear of Serbs using ropes and cars to drag off the testicles of Muslim men. We see Red Army Faction hijackers throwing the brain matter of a murdered airline pilot ‘out of the cockpit window’. We see the Red Brigades shoot one man 22 times in the legs. We see faces blown off by biting on detonator caps; endless head-hackings; botched circumcisions with nail clippers and commando knives; a random Catholic mill-worker in Belfast strung up and cut to ribbons with a chisel before his plea ‘Kill me! Kill me!’ is answered. The forces of law and order aren’t squeamish either. When the CIA needed a DNA sample from a man held custody in Cairo, Egyptian intelligence volunteered to ‘cut off his arm and send it over’.

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books