Michael Burleigh

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Historian, commentator and prize-winning author Professor Michael Burleigh looks at political murder and explains why it is more frequent in some societies than others.

Burleigh looks at the assassins themselves, whether the professionally trained killers of state agencies or those motivated by private miseries such as Lee Harvey Oswald. And he discusses famous assassinations, such as those of Leon Trotsky, Hendrik Verwoerd, Juvénal Habyarimana, Indira Gandhi, Yitzhak Rabin and Jamal Khashoggi. Burleigh asks whether assassination can bring about change or prevent it and whether political murder can be catching like a contagious disease.

Burleigh is a professor of modern history and author of The Third Reich: A New History, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, and Small Wars, Far Away Places.