The Age of Terror

JASON BURKE'S THE REVOLUTIONISTS CHARTS THE DARK JOURNEY OF GLOBAL TERRORISM WITH THE PACE OF A THRILLER AND THE DEPTH OF SERIOUS HISTORY

- —Ajai Sahni

THE REVOLUTIONISTS The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s By Jason Burke PENGUIN/THE BODLEY HEAD ₹1,099; 448 pages

Jason Burke begins his story in an age of innocence, when terrorists simply walked across the tarmac to board commercial flights unchecked, with guns and bombs in their hand baggage. The Revolutionists then traces the evolution of increasingly sanguinary terrorism into the early 1980s, with the transformation of 'secular, leftist' terrorists into the movements of jihad that dominate terrorism even today. Drawing on three decades of front-line reporting, declassified files, and interviews with hijackers, counter-terrorism agents, spies and survivors, Burke crafts a narrative that is as compulsive as a thriller, even as he retains exceptional rigour in argument and documentation.