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This is a book with a message: pay attention to historians! Good advice for all you non historians out there, of course, but Richard English (who teaches in the School of Politics at Queen’s University, by the way, so he is not just promoting his own discipline) has appar ently written with the hope of reaching the policy-makers or influencers themselves – who certainly have been misusing historical analogies and ‘lessons’ at a prodigious rate since 2001. So this really is a ‘how to’ book, with an eye to practical as well as to analytical problems. It is also short and clear enough that even a few politicians might read it. They certainly should. English has been writing about political movements and violence his whole career, and is the author of the best single study of the IRA, Armed Struggle (2004), as well as a history of Irish nationalism, Irish Freedom (2007). Almost uniquely among those who write about terrorism, he has done many years of archival and textual research, talked to many people described as ‘terrorists’, and lived in a city where campaigns of violence were actually being waged.