Today, it is easy to forget how “brutal and random” the 1970s could be, said Hugh Thomson in The Spectator . This was the first age of transnational terrorism, when radicals and revolutionaries deployed new, often deadly tactics in the hope of furthering their goals. They carried out plane hijackings, kidnappings and massacres – from the 1972 Munich Olympics atrocity to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 – and set off bombs around the globe, “from the Tower of London to Washington to Singapore”.

In this “superb and monumental” book, Jason Burke details the main movements – including the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and “our own IRA” – and offers “sharp vignettes of the principal combatants”, among them Leila Khaled, the Palestinian “Grenade Girl” (who h

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