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Alan Judd on Marc Sageman's latest book  Marc Sageman is deservedly one of the best-known academics working on terrorism. A clinical psychologist and former CIA officer, in 2004 he published Understanding Terror Networks, a book which enlarged the way the subject was seen. Hitherto, most researchers and governments had located the ‘root causes’ of terrorism either in religion (Islam) or in social and economic conditions. A third approach, the biographical, offered fascinating case-histories of terrorists thought to be mad or incomprehensibly evil and who generally turned out to be rather more commonplace. Sageman’s achievement was to start with evidence, not theory.

When Edgar Allan Poe bumped into a friend in New York in 1845, according to Peter Ackroyd’s brisk new life, the following exchange took place. ‘Wallace,’ said Poe, ‘I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written.’ ‘Have you?’ said Wallace. ‘That is a fine achievement.’ ‘Would you like to hear it?’ said Poe. ‘Most certainly,’ said Wallace. Thereupon Poe recited the verses of ‘The Raven’. This lovely little cameo — halfway to being a sketch from The Fast Show — is all the funnier for the fact that the joke is not entirely on Poe. Though maybe not the greatest poem ever written, ‘The Raven’ really was pretty spectacular. Poe knew it.

After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century. It begins with a bleak page of epigraphs, among others from Isaiah Berlin — ‘the most terrible century in Western history,’ William Golding — ‘the most violent century in human history,’ and René Dumont — ‘I see it only as a century of massacre and war.

These journalistic pieces and two themed short stories have been written by Martin Amis after, and under the direct influence of, the events of 11 September 2001 in America. In a time of increasing specialisation, some supercilious amusement has been expended on the idea of novelists expressing their opinions on current affairs. Terry Eagleton, the academic who, by maintaining a semblance of Marxist thought in the 21st century, revives the dictionary meaning of the word ‘incorrigible’, is among Amis’s noisier critics. He remarked in a recent interview that he didn’t know why anyone should read novelists on these subjects in preference to window cleaners.

The transition from iconoclastic youth to crusty age is common enough. The emergence of Martin Amis as a critic of Islam (at least in some of its manifestations) may be an expression of solidarity with his old friends Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, or it may be that, as Terry Eagleton suggests, he is turning into his father. Certainly Kingsley may be held to have gone that way, and many of us, as the years pass, do indeed find ourselves resembling Dad. This must be a disturbing thought, often, for our sons. Those whom the gods love die young — before that happens. ‘When Mozart was my age,’ as Tom Lehrer used to say, ‘he’d been dead for years’. ‘Lucky man’ is the unspoken thought.

It might be thought that a book reviewer needs instruction in the skill specified in the title of Pierre Bayard’s book about as much as a moose needs a hat-rack. But cynics should know that the few people who are guaranteed to read a book are, in fact, the last people to be paid to do so. After the agent, the editor and the copy editor, the book reviewer picks up a book like this and reads it carefully from beginning to end, making notes as he goes. None of those people, however, are reading in any kind of normal way; during the industrial process of book production, the level of intricate attention paid to the text produces an experience which is nothing like real reading.