Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists is a welcome addition to the recorded history of political extremism and revolution . Burke is well known for writing quality books within this genre and for me, author of one of the finest books on the background to 9/11 in The 9/11 Wars. Burke’s skill is in taking a handful of individuals, deep diving into their backgrounds to establish where their ideas and unique circumstances shaped their paths to murderous political ambition.

Time can be kind and, as the saying goes; one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist and this selective approach saw a number of these ‘activists/terrorists become cultural icons. Many of us will recall the deep sense of unease amid the reports of deaths and casualties from the Middle East, Britain and Northern Ireland and mainland Europe.

Amidst the names frequently mentioned as masterminds and wanted foot soldiers none were better known than Carlos the Jackal, the undisputed king of the counter revolutionaries in the 60s and 70s, and a man who who claimed the crown more on a folkloric and self-perpetuating publicity drive than as an effective and skilled terrorist.Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was a man both feared and celebrated around the world despite failed assassination and hostage taking attempts, multiple fall-outs with state leaders and other revolutionaries and in truth, an incompetent romantic with a deep conviction of self over political ideals.

The legend of Carlos is of course, very well documented but Burke paints a vivid picture of his life at that time; Baghdad in the summer of 1977, Cairo, Algiers, Geneva, Belgrade, he was linked to far more attacks than he ever committed and he basked in the limelight. But Burke’s telling of his struggles with so-called sympathetic states and terror groups feels fresh and revealing.

The book moves beyond the Middle East and into Europe, the late sixties and early seventies saw the emergence of West German terrorist cells such as Baader Meinhof and the Red Army Faction (RAF) whose members became cult figures and I can still see the wanted posters for Ulrieke Meinhof on walls and lampposts in West Germany. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were relatively unwilling to engage with these terrorist groups, the Stasi were cool towards supporting campaigns in the West, for them, these young radicals did not embrace the true values of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and were happy to see how their exploits played out without them.

At its heart though, this is a book of the Middle East, the plane hijacker’s, bombings, shootings and kidnappings, the key players such as Yasser Arafat, Wadie Haddad, George Habash and Khomeini all committed to an overthrow of the status quo, of Western imperialism and a united hatred of Israel. Many of their exploits were played out on our black and white television screens, a glimpse of a hooded terrorist peering from a hijacked plane or government building and none more dramatic than the siege of the Iranian embassy and the storming of it by the British SAS who shot dead all but one of the terrorists.

The writing flows, it has been written for a wider audience rather than academics and Burke strikes a good balance between detail and accessibility for non-academics and subject experts and few at this moment are doing it better than him.