Terror: How it Came to the Seventies

Abstract

An india-rubber ball which, when squeezed in his trouser pocket, detonated a glass flask of dynamite concealed in his jacket twenty seconds later was the primitive yet effective device carried by the archetypal terrorist of literature, ‘the Professor’. In Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent, written at the turn of the century, this clever university drop-out was pitted against the head of England’s anti-terrorist squad, Chief Inspector Heat. It was entirely appropriate that he should have used an academic title; for then as now the feeling of power enjoyed by a terrorist held strong attraction for intellectuals who turned to the gun and the bomb when their political arguments failed to convince. As he himself boasted, ‘The Professor’ had no future — yet his philosophy goes marching on.