Soviet Mongolia, the German Democratic Republic and Stalinist Poland had very different cultures, but during the communist era all suffered show trials, mass imprisonment and a ubiquitous secret police.Terror cost many more lives in Russia and China than elsewhere, but one reason for this is that, for a time, the communist programme was carried further in them than in other countries. It may be Eagleton subscribes to the academic clich?hat the former Soviet Union had nothing to do with socialism and was simply another version of Russian despotism, but this runs up against the awkward fact that state terror has been a feature of all communist regimes. He tells us that “socialists have always rejected the tactics of terror” – as if Lenin was a fringe figure in the history of socialism and in no way involved in constructing the Soviet apparatus of state terror. However, he has a blind spot when it comes to terror perpetrated in the service of socialist ideals. Think of Pope Innocent III’s crusade against the Cathars of southern France at the start of the 13th century, which cost the lives of around half a million people over a period of 40 years. Killing people to save their souls is a thoroughly mad idea, but the Jacobin notion that systematic terror can be the path to universal freedom is even madder, and it lies behind some of the worst crimes of the 20th century.Eagleton is well aware of the connection between political terror and the modern pursuit of freedom, and it is explored in some illuminating passages in Holy Terror.

Mass murder is a universal human evil but we owe the idea that it can be a means of liberating humanity to the Jacobins, who pioneered terrorism in the modern sense.There are plenty of examples of systematic terror and extermination in earlier times. Reading these authors in this way is anachronistic, and does not enlighten us as to the sources of anxieties. At its worst the result is not much more than an exercise in academic punning.Eagleton does advance a highly specific – and to my mind highly plausible – thesis about the origins of terror as a modern political phenomenon, but he fails to follow it through. At the start of the book he writes that terrorism “first emerged with the French Revolution – which is to say, in effect, that terrorism and the modern democratic state were twinned at birth” Here Eagleton is on to something. A generation ago, much of what is now called terrorism was more accurately described as insurgency.

There were several savage conflicts in the 30 years after the Second World War – in Malaya and Vietnam, for example – but they were recognised as anti-colonial struggles or civil wars, each with its own history and goals, not lumped together into an amorphous category of terrorism and then declared a global threat. Talk of “Fifty ways to leave your lover”: here are 50 ways to break, disguise and celebrate your sonnet. And through the sonnet, your love.Fantastic, to see one of our best and most popular poets going from strength to strength in subtle literary originality, echoing traditional craft from Shakespeare to MacNeice, while making poems that will sound sweetly to all: “their silhouettes/ simple as faith”.Ruth Padel’s ‘Tigers in Red Weather’ is published by Little, Brown. We think we know what we mean when we talk about terrorism, but it is an idea that shifts and changes with the times. Babington’s death, or Jane Grey groping for the block murmuring, “What am I to do? Where is it?”, can still shock. But while the play has been the subject of much attention among the chattering classes, with one national newspaper describing itself as the “real star of the show” because a copy features on the stage coffee table, its opening night was likely to be an understated affair.