Author: Lindsay Porter
Publisher: Thames ' Hudson, 2010
Price: £21.99 (hardback)
Isbn: 9781590203484

Why didn’t I think of it? A coffee table book on assassinat­ion! Coated paper, big print, wide marg­ins, illustrations on almost every page, nicely laid out. Stopping (briefly) at the obvious destinations (and a few less obvious), this runs from Julius Cæsar to Benazir Bhutto.

Nothing too controversial is offered; many evidential fences are sat on. (That some people think maybe Oswald didn’t shoot JFK is as daring as it gets.) There is much about the CIA’s well documented activities in this field and nothing about the less well known KGB’s. Decently written and unexceptional, this turns out unsatisfact­ory because it tries so hard to be inoffensive.

The sections I know something about are irritating because so inadequate. The author presumes a certain historical knowledge, but this won’t tax anyone who can understand, say, Time’s world news pages. On the other hand, if you had no knowledge of what the CIA is/was, would the section summaris­ing the Church Comm­ittee’s findings of the mid 1970s mean much? I have no idea at whom this is aimed.