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in Northern Ireland. The unexpressed goal of bringing about transformative chaos becomes the element in which terrorists are most at home. Destruction and self-destruction briefly compensate for some perceived slight or more abstract grievances that cause their hysterical rage. As endless studies of terrorist psychology reveal, they are morally insane, without being clinically psychotic. If that affliction unites most terrorists, then their victims usually have one thing in common, regardless of their social class, politics or religious faith. That is a desire to live unexceptional lives settled amid their families and friends, without some resentful radical loser - who can be a millionaire loser harbouring delusions of victimhood - wishing to destroy and maim them so as to realise a world that almost nobody wants. That unites the victims of terror from Algiers, Baghdad, Cairo, via London, Madrid and New York, to Nairobi, Singapore and Jakarta. They all bleed and grieve in the same way.

If this book were to be absolutely comprehensive, it would be doubly long, losing its human focus. That is why such subjects as terrorism in Latin America from the Tupamaros to FARC, the US itself, and the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka have been omitted, although there is passing allusion to them all. Alert readers will realise that buried in the history are suggestions about which past policies worked, and which didn’t, regarding, for example, how to deal with imprisoned terrorists who routinely try to convert jails into universities or how to derange terrorist financing by encouraging organised crime. In this I have learned a great deal from studies and programmes in such varied places as Italy, France, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, whose existence and importance are routinely ignored. Since this is not a counter-terrorism manual, any prescriptions are highly tentative, such as disaggregating terrorist movements along their inner fault lines, while emphasising the commonality of suffering that terrorism produces in all our respective civilisations. As long as people hardly react to the news that x number of people, remarkably like ourselves in longing for life, have been killed by a bomb in Egypt or Malaysia, there will be no effective global response to this current epidemic. A properly funded police, intelligence and military response is essential; but so are improved public diplomacy and efforts to deradicalise potential terrorists, for the Hot and Cold Wars are now parallel. They have to learn not only that they cannot win, with even 9/11 merely affecting the operations of Wall Street for a few days, but that they are fighting precisely those societies that can most help their own societies overcome their wounding intellectual and material dependency on the West. When the cause is discredited, Islamist terrorism, like that of anarchists or Nihilists, will significantly abate, although die-hards will never stop.

Nothing would be gained in these pages by attempting to impose uniformity on the spelling of Muslim names. Many Western Muslims have their own preferred forms; French transliterations from the Arabic, for example, differ from English; and there is even debate about the most respectful way to spell the Prophet’s name. My policy is to aim for consistency with each person’s name and not to worry that one is Mohammed, another Mahomed, a third Muhammad and so on. I have similarly left it to my sources to determine whether measurements are imperial or metric.

I would like to offer warm thanks to Heather Higgins of the Randolph Trust and Director John Raisian of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University for making it possible for me to research and write this book under the aegis of a leading US think-tank. Self-evidently it is not one that espouses the sanctimonious ethos of the New York Times and is all the better for that. Andrew Wylie, Peter James and several friends at HarperCollins have made producing this book a pleasure despite a subject matter that frequently lowers one’s spirits. Among the people who