Regimes of Terror: From Robespierre to Conrad

Abstract

To broach the question of the terrorist is not an easy matter. In fact, this chapter might be considered as a fragment from a much longer work which, I suspect, may never be written; at all events, its writing could take place only outside the law, and would be in a permanent state of non-completion. That work would be a history of literary representations of terrorism, and there are at least three good reasons why such a book would be impossible to write or to publish.

How good to stand again on terror firma …¹