Age of Assassins

These were the crimes that were meant to change the world, and sometimes did. The book connects the killing of the Kennedys or the murder that sparked the First World War with less well-known stories, such as the Berlin shooting of an instigator of the Armenian genocide or the attack on an American 'robber baron'. Taking in Malcolm X and Queen Victoria, Adolf Hitler and Andy Warhol, Charles Manson and Emma Goldman, Tsars, Presidents, and pop stars, Age of Assassins traces the process that turned thought into action and murder into an icon. In tackling the history of political violence, the book is unique in its range and attention to detail, summoning up an age of assassination that is far from over.

Michael Newton is the author of Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children and of a book on Kind Hearts and Coronets for the BFI Film Classics Series. He has also edited Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent (Penguin Classics), Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (Oxford World Classics) and The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories. He has taught at UCL, Central St Martin's College of Art, and Princeton University; he works at the University of Leiden. He has written articles and reviews for the Guardian, TLS, THES and London Review of Books.